We have been learning the days of the week, months of the year and now the seasons as part of our beginning of the year work on Calendars. Great minds must think alike because Kylie over at Down Under Teacher has been doing the same topic. Check out her blog for even more ideas! The Australian Curriculum for Mathematics requires that students can name and order the months and seasons and use a calendar to identify the date and determine the number of days in each month. I have made a simple worksheet that requires students to write in the months of the year and identify the seasons. You can download it for free. I am working on a quiz sheet that will require students to use a calendar to answer a series of questions. When I get it done, I will put it up too. My kids are going to work with a partner this week to make their own page of a class calendar that we will put up in our room to celebrate the end of this part of our learning. We have linked our study of seasons of the year to our cross-curricular priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures by learning about the seasons in Arnhem Land through reading the great picture book: Ernie Dances to the Didgeridoo by Alison Lester. The students really enjoyed the story and it lead to some great discussion about the seasons we experience in Queensland compared to places that are much colder or hotter. Because we are a Catholic school, our discussion of seasons has been a great segue into learning about the Liturgical Seasons too. We have constructed a display in our room which focuses on the different colours of the seasons. Yesterday our fantastic Assistant Principal, Michelle, came in to talk to the students about the special colours of the liturgical seasons. The children enjoyed having a special guest speaker. She used an experiment with milk and food colouring to show the different colours. The children thought it was fun to watch the colours swirling in the bowl and we had a great discussion about the "pictures" they could see within the patterns. They surprised me with their deep thinking about the colours and the seasons. I love it when all of the different things we are learning about tie together so beautifully! Have you been learning and teaching about seasons? What have your students enjoyed?
