How to Make a Paper Chain Calendar

Even before my children could understand a regular calendar we created these paper chain calenders, to help them count down towards special occasions. They're fun to make and they help encourage counting skills.

To make your paper chain calender you'll need a series of strips of construction paper. Each strip should be about one inch wide and five inches long. If you're counting down towards a holiday you might want to make your paper strips out of colors that coordinate with that holiday. For instance, a Christmas count down calendar might be made of red and green strips.

A count down towards Thanksgiving supper might be made of fall colors, such as red, orange, and yellow. A countdown calendar towards a favorite event for a specific child might simply be done all in that child's favorite color. If you're counting towards a special occasion that doesn't have a specific color scheme, you can just use this as an opportunity to use up all your left over bits of construction paper that are at least one by five inches.

Choose one strip to be the beginning and curl it around on itself so that the ends overlap slightly, and add a dot of glue to hold it together shaped like a circle. For the next ring, form a circle from another strip of paper, but this time make sure that your rings link up by pushing the second strip of paper through the first ring before you turn its ends on each other and glue them.

Continue adding rings in this fashion until you have one ring for every day between the day your making it and the day of your special occadion.

Give your paper chain a chance to dry throughly so that the rings won't pull apart under their on weight when you hang it up later.

If your children aren't patient enough to hold the rings together to wait for the glue to dry you can tape your rings together instead.

Once you have your paper chain together ad dry find a place in your home to hang it where you'll be able to see it every day. Then pick a time of day to clip your calendar. For instance, you may decide to do your calendar first thing every morning, or last thing before the children go to bed. You can also link it to a specific item that you want done during the day. For instance, we clipped our calendar each night right after all the children had finished brushing their teeth.

Whatever time you choose, gather together once each day and ceremoniously cut off one of the rings to show that tat day is one., use the opportunity to talk to your children about the passage of time. And to work on counting how many rings are left, how many rings are gone, how many rings of each color, an so on.

This project is so much fun that we've taken to doing it for every special event we can think of. Sometimes, if several different occasions are coming up, we'll even have several different chains hung up together so that the children can compare them and see which occasions are closer or further away.

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