Counting the Days: Exploring the Importance of Daily Math Skills and Calendar Knowledge
This blog post discusses the importance of daily math skills in the classroom and how they can affect student achievement and success. It provides tips and resources for teachers to incorporate daily mathematical concepts and activities into their lesson plans. Counting the Days: Exploring the Importance of Daily Math Skills and Calendar Knowledge
Counting the Days: Exploring the Importance of Daily Math Skills and Calendar Knowledge
Daily math skills refer to the ongoing review of essential math knowledge as part of the routine of the school day. There are many effective ways to cover daily math skills. Part of those daily math skills surrounds reading and understanding a calendar. While calendar math became a term for this daily math skill review, calendar math is not limited to what we find on a calendar.
Benefits for Students
When students learn the daily or calendar math routine, it creates a predictable pattern of time in the school day. The expectations stay the same day-to-day allowing students to focus on applying skills. Students gain confidence in their math skills through repetition and daily exposure to these foundational math skills. While calendar math begins with very basic skills, it continually builds through the year in small increments bringing students to more difficult tasks over time. We will also share ways to extend or enrich daily math for students who benefit from more complex applications.
Improving Calendar Skills through Daily Math
Calendar math is better known as a time of the school day when students practice essential skills in a spiral review format. Each grade level approaches these daily math skills differently, but these are the general skills being covered.
- reading a calendar and applying it to real life
- reading and recognizing seasons, months, and days of the week
- understanding the pattern of time, days, weeks, months, and years
- writing the date
- counting, patterns, skip counting
- even and odd
- representing numbers through many forms, such as standard form, tallies, base ten, coins, equations, ten frames, number lines, expanded form, etc.
- greater than, less than, equal to
- weather, temperature
- sorting, analyzing, and graphing real-life information: birthdays, teeth, daily lunch counts
- place value of growing numbers, ten more ten less, 100 more, 100 less, 1 more, 1 less, etc.
Calendar Math Wall
To create a calendar wall, read THIS POST. The Calendar Math Wall anchors and organizes all of the learning. The calendar math wall grows and changes through the year as students are ready to add new and different skills to the routine.
Digital Daily Math Meeting
If the digital version of Daily Math is a better fit for your routines and schedule, THIS POST can provide the right resource. Like the calendar wall, students will progress through daily routines but can add to their learning as the year progresses.
The Rise and Shine Binder
For an interactive experience, The Rise and Shine Binder provides accountability, structure, and growing skills throughout the year. The idea behind the Rise and Shine Binder is to provide an interactive tool where students self-pace through skills as they enter the classroom and wait for the official bell to ring. Over 100 pages of activities can be used throughout the year as students progress.
Daily Math Spiral Review of Skills
Our daily math skill pages provide the perfect spiral review for every day of the school year in grades K-3. Use the daily math skill pages for morning work, seatwork, or homework to ensure students have a solid skill base growing in difficulty through the school year. Perfect for adding to the end of the rise and shine binder for extension or fast finishers during stations too!
Kindergarten Example Pages
First Grade Example Pages
Second Grade Example Pages
Third Grade Example Pages
Monthly Classroom Slides to Create Routine
As students enter the room daily, we want to engage and prepare them for learning. Monthly classroom slides are a collection of themed teaching slides for organization, transitions, and management of a classroom throughout the day. Read THIS POST to see how we build routine and engage learners each day through all the months of the school year.