Kids calendars

Stickers for Christmas and New Year's Eve
This way the kids can count how many days until the event

Both of the boys have calendars somewhere in the house that have all the important dates marked on, but when I first did this with Robert year's ago, I hadn't thought about the fact that he couldn't read. So when I figured out that maybe he was too young to read just yet, we made some changes to the calendar and those changes are what we still put together today. Before we could make those changes I had to pick up a few supplies- rubber stamps and stickers.  I pick up stickers all through the year now especially after a holiday so that they are on sale or clearance. Then sometime during the week between Christmas & New Year's we put together the next year's calendar.  For Garrett, I go through and write in everyone's birthday (boxes aren't quite big enough for his writing),  and some events that he looks forward to like the fair. Now that Robert is older he is responsible for converting birthdates from the old calendar to the new one. Then we get out the stickers and the rubber stamps if there are holidays that we don't have stickers for. We pick certain stickers to represent birthday's(like balloon's) and we have holiday stickers for all of the holidays. The boy's make the decisions as to what the stickers are for. We have crosses for youth group and hiking boots for Cub Scouts. These calendars can always be added to so that they know when soccer practice is or games or when play group and story hour is.

Birthday's this year were marked with firecrackers on this calendar

This is a great way to teach calendar skills, by saying things like, Thanksgiving is the 4th Thursday of November, and seeing which kid can find it first. For Robert it is also great practice in copying information from 1 place to another and to practice spelling people's names who are important to them. For Garrett, he may ask during the year "who has a birthday on tomorrow?" This gives us a chance to sound out the written name. Calendar's are going to be part of their lives in some way, so letting them practice how to use it and making it fun is just part of learning..

Just an idea, I've never done this but I think it might be cool - take pictures of the people that have birthday's on your calendar and them print small pictures on sticker paper so that you would have their picture on their special day.