Teaching the Days of the Week in Kindergarten

     This blog was created for the purpose for teachers to get an idea about how to teach the days of the week to Kindergarteners. For this post, the primary goal is going to be teaching the days of the week so that your kindergarten students will be able to name all of them in order starting with Sunday and ending with Saturday.

 

Beforehand

     There are many things that a teacher can do to figure out whether this lesson is going to be effective or appropriate for your students. A teacher may ask children if they are already familiar with the days of the week. Asking open ended questions like "Who can name one day of the week?". If your children can answer and respond with all the days of the week then this lesson will be a great continuation of the knowledge that they already know. If they can't name all of the days of the week, the teacher may have to show the students a calendar or name cards with the days of the week on them so that they may become more familiar with the names for all the days of the week. For these children, they made need a supplemental lesson that happens before this in order for them to be successful with this one. If students can name all the days of the week before learning the song but can not say the order that they come in correctly then they are ready for this lesson.

Teacher Input

     The teacher will show the Days of the Week Video to his or her students on the projector or Smart Board and encourage them to learn the song by having them sing it together and put movement to it. The teacher will open by having a discussion with his or her students about why knowing the order of the days of the week is important. Students may state their own reasons for why knowing the days of the week in order is important or the teacher may need to guide them to reasons for why they need to know the days of the week in order. The teacher then explains that they are going to learn a song to help remember the order of the days of the week. After they listen to the song once or twice the teacher should have seven children stand up in a line at the front of the class. The teacher will explain that each child is going to represent a day of the week in the song as they sing it. When the day "Sunday" comes along in the song the student who is representing the day Sunday should do something with their hands to show that their day is being said. Once students know what they are to be doing, the teacher is to play the song again several times in order for the students to sing the song all together multiple times. As it plays, the teacher will encourage the students to watch the students in the line as they do the movement with their hands to represent their day. If the video is repeated more than twice, the teacher will switch up which students are the seven selected students that are representing the days of the week to give more students a chance to be a day of the week.

Differentiation

      In the classroom there is never any lesson that does not require differentiation for at least one student. This lesson may need differentiation if you have a lot of diversity culturally in the classroom. The days of the week in America are taught with the start of the week being Sunday. However, in many countries, particularly Hispanic countries, the start of the week is Monday making the last day of the week Sunday. If you have any students who are from one of these countries or have parents from one of these countries, those students may have learned the order of the days of the week with Monday being the first day of the week. The teacher may have to explain to the child that the order that the student knows is not wrong, but that they must learn the one that the teacher is teaching.