Part of my New Year plans included adding some more things to the "school" time that Emma and I spend together. The one on the top of my list was working on the calendar.

She's probably like most children in that the anticipation of an exciting, upcoming event drives her crazy. I especially noticed this around Christmas when I severely dropped the ball with an advent calendar. As soon as the tree was up, to her Christmas was right around the corner. The idea of waiting two more weeks was both hard to understand and simply, hard to do.
So, with that in mind, I decided our New Year was going to begin with a new calendar for Emma. It's definitely time to learn those days of the week, the months and get a general concept of calendar time.

I bought this board in the office supply section at Target (and painted it). Both sides are magnetic--but it is also dry erase and cork board, so there's lots of flexibility. Then I made up all these calendar bits: days of the week, numbers, months, even little weather clip art.

For my purposes, I printed everything on magnetic sheets so that they are easy to use over and over, but I'm sure card stock would be great too. Maybe you could even get them laminated. (And what I wouldn't have done for a paper cutter. After all that work, it was killing me to not have nice straight corners.)
So, designing this project took me way too many hours. Adding to that, I did it all with Microsoft Word. (I'm now in the market for an old version of Corel or Adobe Illustrator for Mac. Anyone have any tips or want to sell one? I NEED a publishing program.)
But as I was working on it, I thought, I'm definitely going to share this with all of you. It's too much work to not pass on. So, I'm working on getting these files on here for all of you. I wanted to put them out as pdf files, but I don't have the ability to save them that way, so for now, they'll just be word files. But at least, you'll be able to modify them if need be.
I'm hoping this works. Let me know if there are lots of problems, and I'll see what can be done to fix things.

Download calendar_days_of_week.doc

Download calendar_number_magnets.doc

Download calendar_magnets2_and_misc.doc

Download calendar_months_1.doc

Download calendar_months_2.doc

Enjoy. And let me know if you use them--I'd love more ideas!

**Thanks to Jennifer at MamaUrchin!! We have pdf's, everyone. They are downloadable over in my sidebar. Thank you Jennifer!!!!***