In this lesson we are learning the days of the week.

Download and print your accompanying days of the week chart to complete as you work through this lesson:

There are seven days of the week, which are made of five weekdays and two days in the weekend.

The five weekdays are:

1. Monday
2. Tuesday
3. Wednesday
4. Thursday
5. Friday

These weekdays are shown in the chart below.

When teaching days of the week, we try and link each day to a memory or an event.

Ask your child to write or draw an activity that they do on each day of the week.

Some examples of activities that they could draw for each day could be:

• First day of school (Monday)
• Last day of school (Friday)
• Eating a certain meal on each day
• A certain television show is on this day
• They visit a relative on this day
• They do a sport or club on this day
• They go somewhere special (park or friends house) on this day

Friday is the final day of the weekdays.

On our chart above we have drawn in what we like to do on these weekdays.

• Monday is the day that lots of people return to work or school after the weekend
• Tuesday is the day I play football
• Wednesday is the day that I always have my favourite meal
• Thursday is the day that my favourite TV show in on
• Friday is the day before the weekend, so I go to the park and have fun

Next we can fill in the two remaining days: the weekend.

The weekend is two days: Saturday and Sunday.

• Saturday is the day that I go to the beach
• Sunday is a day that I stay at home and bake

Here are all of the days of the week.

There are 7 days in total to remember and they are always in this order.

It can help to have the chart printed out as a poster to help remember each day.

When teaching days of the week it helps to tell your child which day of the week it is on each day by saying, “today is…” and pointing on the chart.

Doing this each day helps reinforce the order in which the days pass and to help understand the concept of today, yesterday and tomorrow.

• Today is the day that it is right now.
• Yesterday has finished and it is the day that came before today.
• Tomorrow is the day after today.

Clearly to understand the concepts of yesterday and tomorrow, it is first important to be able to identify today.

When teaching today, yesterday and tomorrow, you can ask:

• “Show me what day it is today.”
• “What did you do yesterday?”.
• “What do you want to do tomorrow?”.

This helps to reinforce the idea that after Sunday, we start again at Monday with a new week.

We can ask questions such as, “What did we do last Saturday?” or “On Friday you will finish school for the Week”, to help build an understanding of the passing of time.

A good way to visualise the days can be as a wheel:

We will practise learning the days of the week by identifying which day is missing out of the seven.

Here is our first example:

Which day of the week is missing?

Wednesday was the missing day of the week.

This can be an easy way to memorise the days of the week and more examples like this can be found on the video above.

Here is another example:

If today is Thursday, which day is tomorrow?

We first need to identify today.

Thursday is here.

Whichever day today is, tomorrow is always the next day afterwards. We move from left to right across out chart.

Tomorrow must be Friday.

Here is another example like that that can be slightly more tricky when the days of the week are presented in a chart form like so.

If today is Sunday, which day is tomorrow?

Remember that tomorrow is the day after today.

Sunday is at the end of the week, so the next day is a new week. The day after Sunday is Monday.

If today is Sunday, tomorrow is Monday.

In this situation, it can be helpful to teach the days of the week shown as a continuous wheel as opposed to a typical chart display.

The following question asks, “Which days are in the weekend?”.

Saturday and Sunday are the two days that make up the weekend.

No other day is a day of the weekend.

Here is an example of going back in time and finding yesterday.

Remember that yesterday whichever day it was before today.

We are told that today is Wednesday and we can mark it on our days of the week chart.

Yesterday is the day before this and so, we move left to go back in time to the previous day.

We get to Tuesday.

If today is Wednesday, yesterday was Tuesday.

When teaching days of the week to children, it can be helpful to say, “Today is….”, “Do you remember that yesterday we said it was …. today?”.

Asking simple questions like this regularly can help children to understand that while the 7 days of the week remain constant, the day which is ‘today’ will change every new day.

In the last example, we are told which day was yesterday.

Yesterday was Thursday, so we identify Thursday on our chart.

We know that today is the day after yesterday. We need to move on one day from yesterday to reach today.

We arrive at Friday.

If yesterday was Thursday, then today is Friday.

It can be helpful to refer to the diagram of yesterday, today and tomorrow above to help understand this.