Make these Months of the Year sequencing sticks from craft sticks to teach and assess a whole range of skills!

Months of the Year Sequencing Sticks

I use these sticks as part of my pre-teaching interview to see whether the learners know their months and seasons, as well as to test reasoning skills and sequencing. You can use these sticks for this fun, hands on Months of the Year Sequencing Sticks.

You will need:

Colored craft sticks / popsicle sticks(You can color plain sticks too)
Marker

Write the names of the months on the sticks. I used association when I chose the colors. We are in the Southern Hemisphere, so blue was for Summer, orange for Autumn, red for Winter and green for Spring.

When assessing, I would ask questions like: “Why do you think the Spring sticks are green?”, “Why are there only 3 of each color?”, “Do we celebrate Christmas when it is a red month or blue month?” to see how the learners reason, make associations and inference too. I also ask which month the child birthday is, to see if they know and tell them mine as a way of getting to know each other better, making the assessment informal.

We mix up the sticks and then learner must put it back in order again. This test sequencing of months and at the same time I can see whether the learners can read the names of the months. We play a game where a month is removed and the child must guess which month is missing.

hands on kindergarten educational activity

As you can see, the Months of the Year sequencing sticks are a simple, but effective assessment tool to use to assess a variety of skills. The use of these sticks in an informal way helps to set the learners at ease, and at the same time gives valuable information as well.