Instructor Notes:

For materials preparations, click ‘Back to Main Menu’ button and select ‘Getting Started – EDC Setup’.

Read Every Day Counts Teacher’s Guide, Kanter and Gillespie, Great Source, 2005 or 2012 edition, p. 48-49.

By midmonth, we can encourage everyone to use the patterns that have appeared so far to predict and describe the piece for any future date. We can ask, “What will appear one week from today?” or “What will the calendar piece look like on Thanksgiving?” It is both informative and fun to hear the range of responses to the follow-up question, “What reasons can you share for predicting this piece?”

It is also a good time to use formal geometry terms in the context of describing what we see. We can see that the purple rectangles are turned or rotated a quarter turn or 90 degrees (as are the red rhombuses) each time they appear. We can talk about the standing up vertical and lying down horizontal orientation of these shapes. We may need to help children see the square belongs to the rectangle family because it has 4 right angles and belongs to the rhombus family because it has 4 congruent sides.

On the dates that are multiples of 3, such as the 18th, we can also look at how many pieces of each color have appeared and connect the meaning of 1 out of every 3 to 1/3 of a set.