buggy kindergarten calendar

Back in May when we attended Maddy’s Kindergarten Orientation, we were given this awesome calendar of activities to carry us through the summer months, right up to the first day of school.

The theme is “Catch the Reading Bug” and the goal is simple: get our kiddos in the habit of reading. Do cool activities with them to encourage real reading. Draw with them, explore with them, and play games with them. Visit the library often. Read every day. Write every day.

As a Reading Specialist and parent who already tries to throw in a little learning each day, I nearly jumped for joy when I saw this, and I knew Maddy would totally dig it. Maybe others will, too. Here are the July and August calendars to download.

Our activities began on July 1, so though we’re a day behind (and I’m not sure we’ll manage to do every day–maybe a few activities a week), we got rolling today:

• Book Cover: Today’s activity was to draw a new cover for a book you have read. We had just finished reading Good Night Dinosaurs by Judy Sierra, so Maddy chose to make a cover for that book. We talked about what belonged on a cover of a book–the title, author, illustrator if there was one, and a picture. We decided that the picture usually gave some clue to what the book would be about.

Good Night Dinosaurs is a book about how different dinosaurs go to sleep and what they do before bedtime. It’s written in rhyme, and the names of the dinosaurs are incorporated in interesting words, like

Mom and Dad diplodocus
(Each one was bigger than a bus)
Chased them off to bed with hisses,
Followed by diplodokisses.

Maddy said she wanted a dinosaur on the cover and she wanted the title to be “just Dinosaurs”. I didn’t argue; it was her new book cover, and she’ll have years to follow rules in school. I was just proud of her for drawing a super dino:

And that was it for today. Any excuse to read, rip a link off of our chain, and to talk about a book is a good day for us. As simple as it may sound, making a new cover for a book does require a bunch of thought and processing for an emerging reader’s mind; she has to think about what the book is about and make that clear to readers. It’s one thing to talk about it but whole other thing to take that second step and actually draw it.

Thanks to MCPS’s Sherwood HS Cluster for developing this super-cool summer calendar for rising Kindergarteners. We love it!