Free printable calendar lesson plans: reuse old calendars

  Hi friends of the Omschool! Teacher Omi (grama) here with free printable calendar lesson plans and ways to reuse old calendars. If you use paper calendars, you've got a treasure trove of math manipulatives at your disposal. Save your old calendars to make hands-on math activities to teach date and time, skip counting, sorting and organizing and calendar skills.

Reuse old calendars as math worksheets. Give students calendar pages and teach them to count, skip count by 2-8, to help kids understand times tables (fact families). The beauty of  reusing calendars as worksheets is that kids can write on them like workbook pages. Use them to teach days of the week and months of the year. 

Reuse old calendars as flashcards. Let children cut and paste calendar numbers onto recycled cardboard. Then students can arrange flashcards in order or by 2-8 fact families. In this way, you get double duty free lesson plans with math crafts and counting activities. 

Reuse old calendars as games. Have students cut and paste calendar numbers to make Memory games, Bingo or a pathway counting game such as Candyland. Students might also invent their own games. This expands these into cross-curricular free printable lesson plans that include writing, reading, spelling, creative writing, design and STEM activities. 

Reuse calendar pictures as homemade kids books. Calendar pictures are usually centered on a theme (nature scenes, etc.) Instruct students to cut and paste the 12 images onto recycled cardboard. Then they can practice creative writing skills to make these into homemade books. Kids might then read the stories aloud to younger children to practice storytelling skills. 

These free printable lesson plans make excellent resources for classroom and homeschool students. 

Free St. Patrick's Day lesson plans with printables, books, activities, crafts and snacks

 Hello my friends of this blog on free printable lesson plans! Teacher Omi (grama) here from the Omschool! (2nd gen homeschool by grama) with St. Patrick's Day printables, activities, games, crafts and snacks. Learn more about St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland and other Catholic saints with these homeschool activities. 

Any time I post about Catholic activities, I have to share Catholic Icing, a wonderful blog created by a homeschool mom featuring a wide variety of Catholic Christian lesson plans, printables, crafts and more.  You can get secular St. Patrick's Day activities anywhere with leprechauns, rainbows, shamrocks and other Irish schmaltz. But for free printable lesson plans on the St. Patrick visit this blog. 

For free printable coloring pages to explore the Bible, Catholic saints, teachings, liturgical activities and more, visit The Catholic Kid.  Loyola Press has pages of Catholic lesson plans  and The Kids' Bulletin has free printable Sunday bulletins for children that follow the Catholic Bible readings of the liturgical year. EWTN Kids has a lot of good homeschool and religious ed activities too. Catholic.org has a plethora of helpful links, activities and lesson plans. Though these sites are free, they're free for moderators to maintain, so a donation is requested to defray costs. 

For kids books on Saint Patrick, read Gail Gibbons St. Patrick's Day and Tomie DePaola Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland or Patrick, Saint of Ireland Joyce Denham and Diana Mayo. The Wolf and the Shield is excellent for older readers (Sherry Weaver Smith). Check this link to Thriftbooks for other picture books, easy readers and chapter books on St. Patrick, Ireland and the saints. 

Stereotypical foods to serve on St. Patrick's Day include the usual corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, Irish soda bread and beer. However, in 4th century Ireland that would be almost unheard of. The fare in 399 was wheat bread (barley was for ale, fermented to prevent the grain from spoiling), sour milk and cream and cheese. Fish was common too, so salmon, eel and trout. Include garlic, apples and watercress too. 

And Patrick was not Irish but a wealthy patrician (where the name Patrick actual comes from) of Rome living in Saxon Britian, the furthest Roman outpost. So prior to being taken slave (or running away as some stories tell it) he would eat as "an expat with a mild case of affluenza" as one author adeptly put it. So this would include such foods as French wines, game birds and peas with coriander. 

In his Confessio, Patrick recalls as a captive living on deer and wild honey. If you want to eat like Saint Patrick really ate, serve salmon with garlic and butter, creamed peas, flatbreads made of wheat (think pita) buttermilk, simple watercress soup and stewed apples with nuts.