Calendar Time- Homeschool Syle

In order to make sure the little ones of my household receive math instruction on a daily basis, I decided to begin the day (after prayer and the pledge) with Calendar Time. Now, many a regular classroom teacher does Calendar Time with their classroom students, so I drew upon their wisdom to create my own "home school" version.
First, we begin by going to the pantry wall, where I have the "Calendar Area" set up.We go through all the "basics" of the day with the use of this "Tell Me About Today" calendar, which can be purchased at a variety of sites on the Internet (I found mine at a consignment sale). The "basics" include:

Month
Date
Year
Yesterday
Today
Tomorrow
Season
Weather

The kiddos take turns changing the information and pointing to the information (with the use of this cute little mini pointer I picked up at a local educational supply store). After going over all that info, we sing the "Seven Days of the Week" song and chant the twelve months. Next we move onto counting how many days we have been in school. We do this visually with craft sticks and name tag pockets to represent the ones, tens, and hundreds places. (This used to be on the pantry door, but it got too heavy, so it is now on the refrigerator door.)We also use stickers to create a number line of sorts. The stickers are in a color pattern and my eldest writes the number of the day of school on each sticker after it has been placed for the day.Pattern practice continues on a calendar print out (from DonnaYoung.org) and homemade stickers.We also will sometimes have another special activity we are doing to correspond with another part of our schooling. The above picture shows our "Columbus Journey." I created two sheets with Columbus ship graphics on them, each box representing a day Columbus and his crew were on their journey to the Americas. We are marking off a box each day so the kiddos can see how long of a journey Columbus took. After the "Calendar Wall" activities are complete, we move onto the calendar notebooks (the kiddos are pumped, can't you tell?). I got this idea from the following website (Mrs. Meacham's Classroom), which I found through Hubbard's Cupboard (an all time fav of mine!).

The first page of the notebook has a calendar in which the kiddos trace the day's number and x-out any days we did not have school. I have them use different colors for different months (orange and black for October, yellow and brown for November, red and green for December, etc.).The next page is a Tally Mark sheet they keep of the days we've been in school. Whenever we reach a group of ten, the kiddos circle the group in red.The weather graph is a great way to incorporate graphs in our school daily. (Please note that Jungle Girl's weather page is skillfully decorated based upon the day's forecast.)The next page visually represents the ones, tens, and hundreds place as it pertains to the number of days in school. Whenever a ones card is filled with 10 start stickers, it moves over to the tens spot. When ten ten cards are collected, they are paper-clipped together and placed in the hundreds spot.Finally, the kiddos numerically represent the days of school with numbers that are velcroed onto the pocket sheet.

Math has never been my favorite subject, but I really do enjoy doing Calendar Math with my kids. Hope you all can find this useful in your schooling!