Price Tag: $19.95
Official URL: horizonsdrc.com/store
Age Range: Roughly  2-thru-teen
Rating:

Almost every parent feels that they could be more involved with their children. The thing that we forget is that “involvement” doesn’t always have to be trips to an amusement park or multi-hour-long outings.

This calendar has daily suggestions from January 1st to December 31st, and the best thing is that it is perpetual. There is no year information on the calendar. So when you’re done with it, flip it over and start again. What’s really fun is taking pictures of the activities and keeping a journal, and seeing how it is different from year to year or child to child. I’ve started a journal with my son and am looking forward to reading it next year while working through this calendar again.

HOW THE CALENDAR WORKS

This little perpetual day calendar is a great inspiration for how you can involve your child in the little things across the day. The entry for today, for example, says “Walk through the house collecting towels to wash.” It took about 10 minutes and my little 27 month old son loved carrying the towels to the laundry hamper. Along the way he learned what the different towels are for. The dish towel, the hand towels in the bathroom, our bath towels, the towel I use to wipe down his high chair and the other furniture in his area. We talked about how things get dirty, and how we’ll wash them to make them clean again. Then we got new towels out of the linen closet and put them back into their places. I let my son point to the one that he thought would be a good fit for each location. I was surprised to find out that he knew where every towel went! He even remembered that he, his dad and I have three different towels. When he declared “MAHMIE’S TOWEL!” I nearly fell over from surprise. A task that I usually rush through without any thought at all had become a learning exercise for my little guy. Cool.

Randomly flipping through the calendar to give you a feeling for other suggested activities.. March 14: Hang things up in a closet. May 1st: Play tag! Try freeze tag, flag tag, or regular tag. May 20: Make homemade silly putty (complete with the ingredients and instructions), October 23: Spot clean with a hand vac or a carpet sweeper.

A mix of the mundane and the special. The active outdoor games, the indoor science experiments, and household chores. The calendar also includes seasonal ideas, cooking projects, crafts, and silly things. There are also quotations scattered throughout that are good for older kids, or just for making mom and dad smile.

CONSTRUCTION

The calendar is pretty standard daily desk-calendar fare.  It is made of medium weight paper with a lightweight cardboard cover and a heavy cardboard base that folds shut.  It is held together across the top with 1.5″ plastic spiral binding. The pages themselves are black and white. Flipping through the calendar one way, you have January 1-July 2. On the opposite sides of the pages you have July 3-December 31.

FEEL GOOD

The calendars are assembled by clients in Horizon DRC’s EmployAbilities program, which teaches adults with developmental disabilities the thinking skills and adaptive behaviors required for workplace success.

In addition, $1.00 from every calendar sold goes toward research to improve the quality of life for those with autism, through a donation to the Foundation for Autism Research and Remediation.

BOTTOM LINE

I love how this little calendar has made me include my son in even more of my day to day life than I already did. My son, of course, loves the opportunity to be involved and be my little helper. This calendar is a great tool for expanding how I think about things, and I’ve found myself being more open to looking for ways to include my two year old in EVERYTHING. The daily nature of the calendar means that I start out every day planning on how to involve my son in household tasks and life in general.

This is a great parenting tool for parents of children in pretty much any age range, but I think that it has a particular appeal for kids 2 and up.