♫ There Are Twelve Months in a Year ♫

In the hallway outside of the kids’ rooms, there hangs a calendar.

I bought it in a teachers’ supply section of an office store. It was designed to hang on a bulletin board so that you could use staples or thumbtacks to hang it up.

This hangs on the hall wall. We use tape. I tried to use that sticky gum stuff so that it wouldn’t rip the base or the numbers, but Johnathan ate it.

The boys take turns hanging the numbers, and we all count together. I didn’t realize how much Johnathan was learning with this activity until this month, when he told me every number that was next all the way to about sixteen. Once we got to the twenties, he was able to pick up his pace again, learning to put the word twenty in front of each number. If we can just get over those confusing “teen” humps, he’ll be on a good counting roll. He isn’t two yet. Scott wanted to keep going to forty, so we just counted beyond thirty-one without the aid of the numbers.

The first of every month, we take down the old numbers and put up new. Every month is a different design. April’s numbers were raindrops and umbrellas. Scott is looking forward to June because it’s fish and seashells. I LOVE that. I pretty up my yearly calendar with stickers for every month. I often said if I had the storage for all of the dishes and wall hangings that I would decorate my kitchen per season. I love assigning apples to September, fall leaves to October, kites and lambs to March.

Every morning we stop at the calendar after getting dressed and brushing teeth. As I point to the month, day, and date, this morning I will say, “Today is Wednesday, May twelfth. This is a day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

We love putting our calendar together. We love that time that we spend counting, talking about what might be happening this month, talking about the colors and shapes on the numbers, looking at the letters in the month’s name. It has become a very hands-on, visual learning tool.