Each day in my kindergarten classroom, I moved the Earth around the Sun so that my students could see that the calendar was not a linear, boxy, abstract entity that re-set at the end of each month.  This calendar mobile was inspired by one that my friend Cheryl Silcox created while she was teaching young children in Shishmaref, Alaska.  It is easy to construct with flexible PVC pipe and sentence strips.  At the bottom edge of each sentence strip, I hole-punched a spot for each day of the month, then numbered the holes.  For each child in my classroom, I hung a special "card" (seen in the photo as birds, spaceships and other shapes) for his/her birthday.  There were cards for holidays as well.  In this way, the students could look up at the calendar above them and see how long they needed to wait until a birthday or a special holiday.  The entire solar system was represented in my classroom, with Mercury close to the Sun and Pluto in a far corner.  In the photo, Venus looks like it is out of place, yet it is closer to the Sun than the Earth.   The Earth isn't visible in this photo, but it should be hanging from the correct day (numbered hole) on the calendar.

I taught kindergarten in Valdez for 8 years, and I kept all of my students' birthday "cards" hanging on my calendar.  My kindergarten "graduates" would come back to visit in my classroom, and they were pleased to see that their birthdays were still in place on my calendar.  When it was their special day, I was able to find them in the hallways and wish them a happy birthday.  We did have a few Jehovah Witness families in Valdez who didn't celebrate birthdays, yet these students were in the other 2 kindergarten classrooms in our school.  

Birthdays were a BIG DEAL in my classroom, perhaps because they provided another chance for us to celebrate our classroom community.   For every student (even those students who had their birthdays during our summer vacation),  we would create a unique "Birthday book" on the day that we celebrated that student's birthday (usually with cupcakes provided by the family...an occupational hazard for kindergarten teachers!).  Each student would illustrate a page about why he/she liked that special student and I would illustrate a page as well.  In the photo below, we were illustrating pages that said, "I like Arriana because..."  The birthday kiddo would illustrate a page that said, "I like myself because..."  During the day, I would take time with each child to help them to write about their illustration.  Some students were able to write independently, like Erin who wrote the example seen below.  Erin was a very advanced student who home schooled for her academic subjects....I love her invented spelling of miniaturized!  Some students wrote a few words and I wrote the rest of the story that they dictated to me.  Then, I would make copies of all the pages so that I could keep a copy of our birthday books in a 3-ring binder in the classroom for my students to read when they wanted.  The original birthday book was sent home with the special student...along with the leftover cupcakes.  

In my post from September 10, 2017 about my morning meetings, you can see the "standard classroom" monthly calendar that I used during our daily gathering.  My students learned and practiced math skills with this "linear" calendar as we counted how many days until a special event (one-to-one correspondence) and counted how many days we had been in school that year (place value and base 10).    We would also estimate objects that the "student of the day" would stuff into our estimating jar, which was located next to the calendar.    Some teachers use this calendar time to practice patterns (ABAB, ABBA, ABC, etc.), but we practiced these patterns during our "centers" time.  Due to our "student of the day" time during the morning meeting, we didn't have enough time to practice patterns as well.  

Each day, my students saw that calendars could be represented in 2 different ways-- circular and linear.  It was exciting to show my students that our planet travels around the Sun every year.  I helped them to understand that when they turned 6 (a monumental event in their young lives), it meant that they had traveled around the Sun 6 times.   I'm thankful to my friend Cheryl Silcox for showing me this circular calendar in her classroom in Shishmaref.  

Here are 2 more photos of my classroom, one from the very beginning of the 2017-18 school year with the traditional classroom calendar chart and one that shows the circular calendar in early May, 2017.  You can see that there aren't as many birthday "cards" hanging on the calendar, yet you can see the Earth in its place for the day, orbiting the Sun.   You can also see how lucky I was to teach in this classroom.  It was full of sunlight for our plants thanks to the large windows overlooking our second favorite place in the school---the playground!