Birthdays are always fun to celebrate in the classroom, and it doesn’t have to stop at just singing “Happy Birthday!” If you have an especially close-knit classroom (or you are homeschooling), you can celebrate students’ birthdays all month with birthday work right on your work shelves. Here are some ideas:

Do the Montessori birthday celebration with the months of the year set up around a sun, then walk around the sun once for each year of life.  You can keep this out all the time for kids to practice with!  I would include a control photo of the way it should look all set up, then put the pieces in a basket for the child to put together on his own.

Put out pictures of that month’s birthday child from different points of his life (very obviously different points) as a sequencing work — let the child put them in order from youngest to oldest.

Have a candle lighting and blowing out work! Set up a tray with a sturdy candle, some long-stemmed matches, a match striker sticker, and a safe place to put the used match.  Only put out as many matches as you’re comfortable with a child using in one sitting. Demonstrate how to safely light the candle, observe it for a while, and then carefully blow it out.

Set up a card making work! Have some blank cards available for decorating and writing happy birthday messages in, then each child can use that work throughout the month and deliver it to the birthday child during the official celebration.

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