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Calendar
Concepts and Organizing Data
| Type
of Submission: |
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This
idea is a submission for:
X A curriculum
idea
__Cool things to do
__A special issue
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| Age
group for whom this activity is appropriate:
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3-5
year olds
| Brief
description of activity: |
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Working with calendar concepts
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Learning to collect and organize data
| What
I did to set this up and how I followed through: |
| I
sent a simple form home to get information about
dates that were important to families (for example,
Easter or Ramadan) |
| Materials
used: |
Paper,
software for calendar program (for example, KidDesk)
| What
the children had to do and what I wanted them
to learn: |
- Worked
with each child individually on the computer calendar
program to enter his or her birthday and special
days.
- In
entering the data, the kids had to recognize the
number of the date.
- This
activity also gave the kids experience with the
order of the months.
- They
learned to use the computer to record and organize
information.
- We
printed out the individual calendar months and
could see how many birthdays were in each month.
We hung these in our meeting area.
| Background:
How I got the idea: |
The
kids always love when it’s their birthday and they
get very excited, waiting for that day. I have a daily
meeting with the class in which we talk about what day
it is, what month, etc. I also think it’s important
for them to begin thinking about the computer as a tool
for recording and organizing information. This let me
put two ideas together – using the computer to organize
calendar information.
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| Analysis:
How the kids and/or parents responded: |
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The
kids really loved checking the class calendar –
both on the wall and on the computer – to see whose
birthday was coming next. This seemed to give more excitement
to our daily routine about the calendar. Sometimes we
had our morning meeting gathered around the computer
calendar to put in additional information, like a field
trip. The parents also liked that the kids were "researchers."
They liked sharing information about their families,
not just the children’s birthdays. I think it made
a nice connection between home and school and highlighted
the cultural diversity in our classroom.
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| Extension |
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To
follow up, we made a graph showing how many birthdays
occurred in each month.
You
could also extend this concept by using the computer
calendar to record information about the daily weather.
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