Teaching seasons, months and weeks. Circular calendar

How do you start teaching seasons, months and weeks of the year? A child may know the days of the week and the months of the year, but how to they relate to each other? And how do the seasons fit in? It’s perhaps a little daunting to dive straight in, so it’s best to start with the separate elements, going from ‘long (the seasons)’ to ‘short (the weeks)’.

Teaching seasons

The cyclic character of the seasons are easiest to envision. Kids (in the Northern hemisphere) can easily associate them with their natural events: blooming flowers and young birds in spring, warm and sunny Summers, colourful leaves in Autumn and a cold snowy Winter. They can understand the cycle of the year in terms of the seasons. That’s a great starting point.

Teaching months

Kids tend to learn the months as a chronological list: January, Februari, March, .. but how do months relate to the seasons? Although a new year starts at January 1st, Winter does not!

To clarify this I decided to draw the scheme that I personally have in mind. It fits the seasons, months and weeks in one single image. Now I suppose everyone has a different way of depicting the elements of the year. Personally, I have a circular calendar in mind that runs in an anti-clockwise fashion.. The year is divided into 12 equal parts (except for poor February), while and the seasons are drawn as quarters. As the seasons officially start at the 21st of the relevant months, they are a bit skewed compared to the rest of the scheme.

Fitting in weeks

How do weeks relate to months, and to the rest of the year? While every year starts with a new months, a new month does not necessarily start with a new week! On top of this Februari is playing a little trick..

Now the elements are coming together: the big Year circle, already divided into twelve months, is also (separately!) divided into 52 weeks. When you look closely at the graph, you can see that every month spans 4,5 weeks (except for poor February encompassing only 4 weeks).

So, here it is! A schematic overview of the year, where you can see how the weeks, months and seasons relate to each other. I tried to keep it simple, and hope it’s a useful tool for teaching seasons, months and weeks of the year!

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More educational tools

Are you teaching the clock as well? Please find a printable educational poster, where you can learn to read the clock, or look at a simple clock animation for telling time. Always useful!

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Teaching seasons months and weeks