The Importance of a Calendar

For the past couple of weeks I've been trying to get myself into some good habits so my family life flows more smoothly.  Part of that is the inclusion of a calendar, so that no one is caught off guard by activities they've forgotten or anything else.  That means at the beginning of the year we'll be putting up a calendar and filling it with notations for important dates, classes, work schedules, meetings, and homeschool events.  It's going to become a central part of our family, which is what we really need to keep ourselves on track.

As I started thinking about this project I realized that my daughter and I haven't done any work with a calendar in quite some time.  She'd been "struggling" through the days of the weeks and the months of the year.  It really wasn't struggling.  It's just more interesting to stare out the window and get distracted by every little sound than to settle down and do some serious work.  It's apparently not nearly as fun as getting lost in space.  Even so, if we're going to be relying on a calendar so much to keep us on track, it's something she's going to need to know how to use.  The whole family is going to have to get used to it.

Today we took about a twenty minute lesson to pull up our calendar.  We talked about what day it was.  My daughter realized by looking at the calendar that she's going to see the Christmas lights tomorrow.  She got all excited about that.  We found Christmas and Christmas Eve on the calendar.  We talked about how having a calendar was important because it helped us find important dates.  We talked about the days of the week, though we didn't focus on the months of the year terribly much.  We'll go through the months again as the months pass.  We've made some serious progress!

All of this got me thinking about the way we've been working on our lessons.  All too often it's easy to work on these skills without enough emphasis on why they are so important.  It's easy to say, "This is boring!  I'll never use this!" when you don't know how it will ever be applied to your life.  In our case, we've done something different.  Yeah, learning about the calendar wasn't exactly on my daughters list of awesome, fun things to do, but she now understands why we find calendars so useful, and so important.  She's starting to look forward to working on the calendar again tomorrow.  We're finally making progress!