Using Calendar Cards: Making a Seasonal Number Line

I often hear those are great calendar cards, but I don’t have space to use them. One simple way to use them is to make a number line. Kids that are just starting math often use a number line for those activities. This makes it fun and is easy to change up for the season you are in or their interests.

There are ton of ways to make number lines. I love using the calendar cards because I can mix it up any time I want. Plus there are so many different calendar cards to pick from. You can use your child’s interests to help them learn.

What you need for this activities:
Calendar Card Number line, numbers 1 to 30, glass gems, construction paper, glue stick and scissors.

For this example we used some of the Christmas Calendar Cards. We use the Santa version of the cards for the activities and line. You can use any version of the calendar cards that are on the site.

These calendar cards would make really fun number lines:

How to Print the Cards Smaller

Below is simple an easy to understand directions on how to print the cards smaller. This makes them small and easy to use for the number line. This will also make them the same size as I have used.

1. Open File in Adobe Acrobat Reader
2. Push print
3. Select pages 3 through 8.
4. Move to multiple under Size & handling
5. In Pages per sheet select 16
6. Page order should be Horizontal
7. Orientation should be Landscape (I like landscape better for this than Portrait.)

Making the Number Line

I cut out the calendar cards and glued them on some construction paper. I kept the three cards together to keep it easier to glue. I use the numbers 1 to 30.

For our activity I used both the pattern cards and the 6 image set cards. I use the cards we had in our calendar for part of the activities. To see how to print them small as in the example read Printing Calendar Cards Smaller.

Hands On Learning

Find then Number
One of the first activities that we did with the number line was just finding the number. We took our calendar cards and mixed them up. We used the numbers 1 to 30. She would look at the number on the card and then find the number on the line. She would place a glass gems on the number line. She did about 10 of the numbers.

Ways To Add Up
The second activity that we did was to learn ways to add up to a number. We used numbers 1 through 6 for this activity. She would pick a card and then place the glass gems up to that number. We would pull the gems off and arrange them in 2 different piles. First we would see if we could make the gems even on both sides. They we would mix it up. This was a great way to work on ways to add up to that number. We would say 2 + 2 = 4 or 1 + 3 = 4.