How To Make a Weekly Calendar For Toddlers

“What are we going to do today?”
It’s one of the first questions to come out of my daughter’s mouth in the morning.

She very much likes a routine and I think it makes her feel safe and content when she knows where we’re going and what we’re doing every day. My husband and I have a great family calendar that keeps us in check. However, I realized that our daughter doesn’t have a calendar of her own to reference.

I went on a mission to do a weekly calendar for her; one that would let her have an active part in planning her day and could help her stay on routine. I found a great idea for a calendar on a blog, Momma.Papa.Bubba and decided to use her calendar as a model to make one for my daughter. The best part is— it was pretty easy to make. I created my design in Word and used shapes to make the boxes and text boxes for the words. Once I had the calendar finished, I started making all the calendar images and events. I used Word again and made several text boxes on one sheet. Then I found images that correlated to each activity and inserted the image along with the description inside each text box.

Tip: Don’t forget to make multiple school event cards and birthday cards as you might have many of these events in a week.

I then had the calendar and the calendar event cards printed and laminated at a local print shop.

Once at home, I cut out all the calendar event cards and trimmed the calendar. I bought velcro strips at the local hardware store and put velcro on the calendar and event cards. I used three velcro squares for each weekday so there could be many options for events on each day. Our weekends are slower so I only put one velcro square (although I wish I put two or three— maybe next time!)

We chose to keep the calendar in the kitchen and every morning my daughter checks to see what we are doing. It is fun on the weekends when we put the calendar together for the week. On the days we have open, she can go through the calendar event cards and suggest activities. It has been so great and having her know what we are doing has really made our days run smoothly. Last week was one of the first times I was able to do a few personal errands without a major fight from her and I think it is because she was knew beforehand that we had scheduled errands that day. Love it!

Hope you enjoy making a weekly calendar for your toddler as much as I did.

Check out my post on creating a family calendar at Organized Family | 7 Ways to Manage Your Family Calendar

You asked, so we created free printables here:

Weekly Calendar for Toddlers

Here are a few sample activities:

Print out activities here.