Linear Calendar

A Montessori inspired linear wall calendar for a single year.

This is an ongoing project to help my (currently) 4 and 7 year olds better understand the passage of time and past & future events.

It was something I had been planning to do for a while, but hesitated to start due to the large scale of the work. I wanted something that was both a permanent fixture in the house that the kids would see and could interact with every day, while remaining at least somewhat evergreen and reusable for a good few years.

Main elements:

• start and end year
• a single road for the calendar year
• days of the month, coloured based on the month
• daily markers under the days of the month to ‘tick off’ the days that have passed
• decorations around the road themed based on each month (work in progress)

To be added:

• names of the months – missing at the moment, still need to pick the size and format for them
• tiny picture frames under family members’ birthdays
• more interactive elements

Process

Because of the semi-permanent nature of the project it took me a while to properly get started beyond measuring and sketching and planning.

The first step was to sketch out the rough outline for the road and soft mark the days to see where the months fall. I did measure out if all 365 days would fit, but as a large chunk of the calendar follows the incline of the stairs I had some doubts. Fortunately it fit quite comfortably. My son helpfully added little smilies at the start of every month so they were easier to spot.

I wanted the road to be a bit more tactile than just paint on the wall. After researching a few options a foam seal ended up my material of choice. The marked out road space provided some room for testing out pens and design styles for the days of the month.

The spacing between the velcro dots started off quite tight, but it turned out that they can be allowed a bit more breathing room without outpacing the pencilled in numbers. Made me feel glad I spent that extra time writing them out.

It took me a bit to decide what to do about the 29th of February. In the end I kept it inline rather than pushing it out and will add a little velcro cover for it for years that it is not applicable.

The first numbers and velcro dots were a bit uneven, but I decided to leave them as they were for the time being. Which turned out to be a good choice as when it came to painting things didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated…

Magnetic Paint

The plan was for the road to both be a tactile experience, but also serve a purpose – a place to add notes and move tokens along. Magnetic paint sounded like a great idea for that. It took a while to pick the paint though, as generally whichever brand I looked at had very discouraging reviews and the cans are not cheap to just try out several.

In the end I went with the one with the most good reviews. It did take 3 layers for magnets to start sticking to the wall (glad I read the reviews warning about this being the case). The paint was really hard to mix and quite heavy to apply, so while it probably could use another layer it didn’t seem worth the mess.

Speaking of mess, there were definitely some lessons in preparing your workspace involved. The first coat might have been a bit too liquid and leaked through the road edge foam messing up not just the wall (which thankfully washed off easily when cleaned up straight away), but the already applied velcro. In the end the white part of the walls needed some touching up in places too.

With lessons learned I covered the road with masking text for the following layers, which worked well. The main downside was I had to paint over my pencil numbers before I added the velcro below. However by that point I’ve grown quite confident about keeping the spacing even between the days.

Daily Tokens

To mark the passing of time I use a little magnet on the road that can be moved along. Each day also gets a velcro attached little token.

• January – snowflakes
• February – paper hearts
• March – paper clovers
• April – raindrops (tear shaped gems)

These have been quite a challenge to make as they can’t be much larger than the 1.5cm velcro stickers, but also can’t be too small as I prefer the velcro to be mostly obscured when the token is applied. I’ve ended up using smaller 1cm size dots for the soft velcro side that attaches to the tokens and even had to halve that for the raindrops.

Something that really shouldn’t be a surprise, but seems to catch me out nearly every time, is how much time do small repetitive tasks end up taking. Cutting out one snowflake/heart/clover – quick. Cutting out 30ish and somehow the evening is gone… On the other hand doing a large number like that does help find the patterns and the right moves to get the right / same shape consistently.

Future

I was hoping to get more of the months decorated by now, but I realised that I’d like each month to pretty much be its own mini-mural. So while I have some butterflies for May, it still needs flowers. And there’s fairies to come for June next to the large sun. As this is a living project I’m okay with continuing to add bits and bobs as the year progresses. It leaves more room for ad-hoc experimentation that way 🙂