A perpetual calendar can be used to help children learn to understand the passage of time, the rhythm of the seasons and why the moon is seemingly changing its shape all the time.

It’s fun to create your own calendar, but it can be tricky to get the circle and segments right, so I have made a template that you can download from my Etsy shop.

How does it work?

The calendar consists of different dials that are layered on top of each other and held together with a split clip. It has a selector dial that you and your child can use every day to indicate which month, season, weekday and moon phase you are in.

The file includes a blank template because you may want to design and colour the wheel yourself, and make it part of a lesson about the rotation and revolution of the earth and how these impact life on earth and the passage of time.

Colours

The colours I have chosen are in line with the colours in Waldorf education for each month and season, and the days of the week.

It may strike you that the days of the week are not in rainbow order. This is because each weekday is named after the sun, moon and planets of our solar system and each is assigned a certain colour:

• Sunday – Sun – white
• Monday – Moon – purple
• Tuesday – Mars – red
• Wednesday – Mercury – yellow
• Thursday – Jupiter -orange
• Friday – Venus – green
• Saturday – Saturn – blue

You can bring language teaching into this too – for example the weekdays in Italian are (similar to French):

lunedì – (luna = moon) Monday
martedì – Tuesday
mercoledì – Wednesday
giovedì – Thursday
venerdì – Friday
sabato – Saturday
domenica – Sunday