I’ve had a project in my head for awhile that I finally completed this week! I’ve had this Tell Me About Today Calendar for awhile and I like it for a number of reasons. It’s relatively small, it has Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow in a logical order and the pillowy weather, season and date icons are fun.

What I don’t like about it, at least for my 3yo pre-reader are all the words. So I decided awhile ago to replace the days of the weeks with images representing their etymology. So I downloaded pictures of: Sun (Sunday), Moon (Monday), Tyr (Tuesday), Odin (Wednesday), Thor’s hammer (Thursday), Frigga (Friday) and Saturn (Saturday).

Here are the images, printed on cardstock, laminated and cut to size. The first one (Sunday) shows the back with a small Velcro tab glued in the center.

The idea here is that DJ can visualize the days of the weeks better right now through images than through written words. At the same time, he’ll get a Sensorial experience of where the names of our week days came from. The English language has such a rich history and until I started thinking of how to represent days as pictures, I hadn’t really thought much about where those words came from. It will be a long time before DJ learns about etymology, but when he does, I hope these words will have a familiar feel to them.

Here is the completed project, with October 8th showing a 1.5″ square image of Odin, representing Wednesday (or Wōdnesdæg in Old English). DJ seems to approve.