Months and Seasons: Color the Season

A color key across the top of this first-grade seasons page gives the four seasons with their signs and a swatch each: Winter blue, Spring green, Summer yellow, Fall orange. Below it twelve month cards run in calendar order, January to December in three columns of four, each with an empty circle to its right. The child reads each month, decides which season it falls in, and colors its circle in that season's color. Nothing is scrambled and nothing is written; the whole task is twelve reading-and-coloring decisions.

This is where the months and the seasons meet for the first time in the catalog. The months are in order because the point is the grouping, not the sequence: a child colors December, January and February blue and sees that a season is three months long and that winter straddles the turn of the year. The key does the naming, so the page can be done by a child who knows the seasons well but is still shaky on which month is which. The teacher looks at March and September, the months that start a season, where children most often color one month too early or too late.

It needs the four colors from the key, in crayon or pencil, on one portrait sheet. The months of the year in order page is the natural warm-up if the sequence is not yet secure, and the season wheel at kindergarten gives the four-season cycle the months are now attached to. A finished page makes a small season chart for the child's desk.