Sunday, January 3, 2010

Establishing a Regulatory Pattern in the New Year aka A Page-a-Day Calendar

I have procrastinated completely avoided making goals and resolutions for the new year. Here's one of the few goals I sortakinda thought about.

I usually buy the children their own page-a-day calendar for Christmas. My baseball player got a baseball-themed calendar, my middle schooler who loves all things art got an arts-and-crafts themed calendar, and this year, my homeschooler got an Origami calendar.

RDIers are always looking for ways to establish and incorporate rhythms and regulatory patterns into our days, where we can give our kids experience with "same but different, different but same", variations on a theme. Calendars are a practical way to incorporate a pattern, whether you are marking Xs through the days and weeks of a wall calendar or you're ripping off a page from a page-a-day calendar.

As I looked over the selection of calendars in the wholesale club, I decided to try an Origami calendar, again. I bought one several years ago, but my homeschooler was not developmentally ready to join me in folding a page a day. She needed more experience in "joining" first. The calendar went mostly unused, despite the wonderful opportunities it offered in "we go" and fine motor skills.

This year, she is more ready than I am. She brought me the January 1st page on, you guessed it, January 1st, to fold into something. (It's the nightinggale on the left in the photo above.) And on January 2nd, she brought me (wait for it!), yep, January 2nd, which, to my delight, actually LOOKS like what it is supposed to look like, a dog's head:

If you are looking for a way to incorporate a regulatory pattern into your day, try spotlighting a pattern that already exists, by using a calendar. And a lot of calendars are on sale right now.

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