Calendar and Planner for Dyscalculia
Video Transcript:
Hi everyone, Laura Jackson here from Discovering Dyscalculia. I have a new tool for you. This was created by my dyscalculic daughter and she uses this calendar as both a planner and a calendar that just makes a little more sense to her than the classic calendars we have found in stores and online. We have so far not been able to find one that she really clicks with so she ended up creating her own. And I have it here to share with you.
We have made this one a 2023 to 2024 school-year calendar, so it starts in September and goes through August of next year. I wanted to show this to you and just go over some of the differences and some of the reasons this helps her.
So this month September, on the right hand corner it says what month it is. So one thing that's difficult for dyscalculics is if a date says say "9/4" she doesn't always know what month "9" is. So this calendar here just makes that connection for her so September is month number nine. So let me show how this works on basically all of these months.
Here we are in October month number 10. And each week has some little separations that a normal calendar doesn't have. So dyscalculics struggle to see and understand numbers as groups and as sets. So breaking up some of those sets that we have in our week has really helped my daughter understand and have a better vision for what's coming up and what is passed. So here we see each week has its own segment. There's a space here in between the weeks, so instead of a normal calendar where it's gridded and there's one box after another this shows my daughter, "Okay we're going to work this way through this week, from left to right, and that is a week all in itself."
She likes to also designate a difference between the weekend and the school day. So for her Monday through Friday it's one set and then she has a little two-day set which is the weekend for her. Then Monday the week starts again and she has another week. And that is basically it.
So it's just really having:
Delineation between the weeks which is clearer for her when she looks at it.
Delineation between the weekdays and the weekends.
Not having a grid.
Small numbers.
Now she uses this as her planner so she actually writes in here different things: when homework is due, if she has a sailing regatta, if she has a driving test. She lists those things right in here in her calendar. And what she does is she just prints out um she actually usually just prints out one month at a time and because it's a PDF if it gets too cluttered or messy or she wants to redo it she just prints out another one.
This one goes through August of 2024. And you can download this see how it works for your student. See if they find this kind of clean setup more easy to understand. And if you have suggestions on what would make it even better, please let me know.
I know one thing that we wish is that the boxes could be a little bit bigger, but we had a hard time managing that on a normal sheet of eight and a half by eleven paper and still be able to get that nice white space in between each week and weekends in there. But if you have other ideas please let us know because we are always looking to create new and better tools for the dyscalculics in our lives.