Jungle Classroom Calendar

The kids wanted to do a "Wild Kratts" theme this year for our classroom, so I'm making everything jungle themed.  This large classroom calendar can be printed as a "architect print" (22x17) for about $5.

To download the large wall calendar, click here.

And here are the themed months, days, and years cards:

The cards can be downloaded here.

These calendar cards fit a standard classroom calendar or could be resized for a smaller pocket chart.   The four sets are coordinated so that they can be used together for pattern work or separately.  They could also be used for a number line.

To download the individual sets, click on the links below:

Numbers in the Jungle Cards

Zebra Cards

Tiger Cards

Giraffe Cards

I like to give the kids as many things to look forward to in a month as possible.  Which is why I just made way too many holiday cards for our classroom calendar.  There are four pages of holiday, fun days, and events to encourage kids to get counting and anticipating.  There are even five cards just for counting down!

The set includes all major holidays, nerd days, school events, and family celebrations.  They can be downloaded for free here.

With little kids, I've found it helpful to have extra visuals for how the calendar works.  This Days of the Week spinner helps toddlers and preschoolers to see the circular aspect of our calendar.  Every morning, the spinner can be moved counter-clockwise to change the day of the week.  I also included a "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" slider for marking out the day of the week on the big, traditional calendar.  I'm hoping that these two tools will help my kids understand the days of the week part of the calendar.

To download, click here.

Just like the days of the week spinner, this Months of the Year spinner helps kids to see the continuous cycle of our calendar.  At the beginning of the month, the teacher can spin the circle counter-clockwise to show a new month.  It could also be spun as the months of the year song is sung.  I think it is especially helpful to show that January follows December.

To download the file, click here.











Continuing our Wild Kratt's classroom theme is this jungle weather station.  Every day, the teacher and children can decide whether the weather is freezing, cold, cool, warm, hot, or boiling.  The idea is to help kids become familiar with the language of temperatures and the look of a thermometer before a normal thermometer is introduced in later years.

Secondly, the children can decide whether the sky is sunny, cloudy, rainy, windy, or snowy.  All weather pictures depict real events (from Wikimedia Commons) and are not cartoons.

To download the PDF, click here.

I have 2 sets of number cards in the jungle theme.  The first set are traditional 20 frames and cover numbers zero through twenty.  They do not feature any animals or cartoons, only stamped footprints as the counters.  That set can be downloaded here











Next, I decided that a horizontal set of cards would be helpful.  This time, I added the number word, tally marks, and base-10 blocks to the cards.  The numbers go zero through twenty and can be downloaded here.












After I did 20 numbers, I decided that I needed to continue our number of the day concept until at least one hundred.  But, I didn't want to do one hundred cards as detailed as the previous twenty, so I made smaller cards and just included the base-10 blocks.  The card with "number of the day" is the base and will be stuck onto our calendar board permanently.  The other cards can be changed out daily we count up to one hundred.  These cards can be downloaded here.

As part of our calendar time every day, we're going to be keeping track of the number of day we've done school.  I made this sign to go on our calendar board.  The colors correspond to our ones/tens/hundreds blocks.  Above the sign, I'll display our "toothpick counters."  We'll start out filling the ones place with colored toothpicks.  When we get ten, I'll put a rubber band around them, and we'll place them in our tens place.  When we have ten bundles of ten, we'll move them to the one hundred place.

You can download the PDF file, which contains the mat, the colored numbers (white, orange, blue), and plain numbers for doing your own colors, by clicking here.


The number of our days in school will then become our number of the day, which we will count out different ways as time and skill level permit.  We will be adding a sticker a day to our 10-frame page in our notebooks, which I think the kids will enjoy.  I've also had the idea of adding a penny every day to a penny jar.  We can convert the pennies to nickle, dimes, and quarters as we get enough change.  I think showing the quantity of days in a few different formats will be helpful for developing number sense.

The Number of the Day worksheet is available here.

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