Dates

When I am working, the day's date is quite important.  My students and I write the date several times a day and the date is used in any type of planning I do which happens all the time.  For my entire teaching career, I've had a large academic pocket chart calendar hanging in the front of the room and that calendar would get referenced often.
This year has been different though.  My school district adopted a new math program, and that program has a component that includes a daily calendar activity.  "The Calendar" process is something that kindergarten and first usually do - they count the number of days in school, learn the days/months, and represent the numbers in various ways (coins, tens/ones, etc), but few second grade teachers do because our math is more complex by then.  The calendar component in our program goes beyond the "old-school" way and allows for a lot of higher level skills and student discourse.  I mostly like it.

The one issue I have had is that the calendar date cards have patterns on them, and so they are kept turned around until that date so the students can make predictions.  It's a great learning activity, but it is useless to me as a calendar because I can't see the future dates.  For the first few days of the new school year I'd look up, kind of lost, looking for the date.  I thought about putting up my other calendar just to see the dates, but it's quite large and space is tricky.  A hanging wall calendar was an option, but then I decided a dry erase calendar would be best for my needs.  And since having a matchy-match cute classroom makes me a better teacher (said sarcastically) I decided it couldn't just be any old Staples' dry erase calendar.
I had seen some on Pinterest made out of picture frames, which was the direction I went.  I found a cheap frame at Target.  After taking the matting out, it had a 14"x18" opening.  Many measurement calculations took place to finally narrow down my sizing - 2"x2" squares evenly spaced around a 1-1/2 inch border.  I cut down post-it notes to the square size and used them to layout where I wanted everything.

One at a time the post-its were replaced with squares of red and blue cardstock.

I added little day-of-the-week tags at the time.   If I were to do it again, I would have moved everything down a bit in order to center the entire shape.  

Once inside the frame, it's completely customizable when using a dry erase marker.

August's calendar...

and September's.

I wish the blue matched the the blue of the boards a little better, but I thought the muted colors would be better to see the marker.  I'm happy with how it turned out, and it's made date planning much easier.