Tutorial: Circular Perpetual Calendar

For kids of a certain age, the new year is the perfect time to begin a study of the calendar.

My goals for this study are for both kids to memorize the sequence of months and a canonical poem relevant to each season (we've already got "Stopping by Woods" in our back pockets, so there's plenty of time to search for a springly-type poem). The older kid might not be interested in much more beyond that, although I have a list of books on calendar history and calendar cultural studies to sneakily sneak into her library book stash, but for my little kid, who's really enjoying her art right now and who could always use more practice with number sequencing, I have in mind a year-long project, really, having to do with creating a twelve-month calendar, working on one month, well...a month!

For starters, however, I wanted each kid to discover for herself the pattern of the months and the seasons, so together we made each of them her own circular perpetual calendar.

To make the calendar, you need a large piece of paper, the larger the better. We used some professional-quality artist's paper leftover from my partner's days as an undergrad majoring in art, but white posterboard, or a large piece of newsprint, would also be perfect.

Mark the centerpoint of your paper (it's fine to eyeball it), and draw a circle around that centerpoint. You want the circle to be large enough to give the seasons their due, so...a diameter of at least six inches or so? Use a plate as a template, perhaps, but one of the round ones, not the pointy-hat Halloween one that, yes, is STILL in circulation in our house.

Now comes the tricky part: you want the inside of your circle divided into four quadrants, but you want the OUTSIDE of your circle divided into twelve rays that extend to the edge of the paper. Here's a handy trick for dividing a circle into twelve parts without measuring angles.

Draw all your lines in black Sharpie, because you want them to be very visible, and when you decide which of the twelve outer segments will be December and which will be January, make that line very dark--that's the yearly division between December and January.

Only after I had completely finished these two outlines did I invite the kids to make their calendar. Using the black Sharpie, each kid first wrote the names of the seasons in the proper order in the proper space--

--and then added the months in THEIR proper places:

If you use watercolor paper or some other kinds of professional artist's paper (NOT posterboard), I personally think that these calendars would look simply glorious painted using wet-on-wet watercolor (if you check out my tutorial, please note that I've come to prefer wetting huge pieces of watercolor paper section by section with a sponge, as opposed to the dunking that we give small pieces). Neither of the kids were really feeling the watercolor groove, however, but neither was interested in coloring in those large spaces with pointy crayons or marker tips, either, and so I had another reason to be thankful that I went ahead one day and bought a set of Stockmar block crayons, even though I have big kids, not toddlers:

The result of the each kid's hard work is a calendar so special that it gets to live on permanent display, one in their shared bedroom, and one on the wall in our study/studio:

The older kid developed the neat little trick of color-coding her months, so that she could remember what fun holiday each held, such as this red and green December that reminds her of Christmas:

I have to say, however, that barely into January, this is already the season that I, personally, am most looking forward to:

And we haven't even had any truly gigantic snowfalls yet!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!