How can I use this resource?

Create a continuous calendar, embracing nature's cycles with the Year Circle project. A year circle is a continuous calendar that can accompany us through many years. It helps us to understand the seasons and allows us to live in harmony with them. This year circle, which has a diameter of 24 inches, is an impressive project that’s perfectly suited to group work!

What does this resource contain?

This resource offers templates for crafting a 24-inch diameter Year Circle, a perpetual calendar designed to align with nature's rhythms.

About the Year Circle

Nothing in nature stays still. If you observe the rhythms of the natural world, you realize that everything runs in cycles and continually repeats itself. This constant cycle influences not only animals and plants but also the rhythms of peoples’ lives. We used to orient ourselves by this cycle. The duration of a day was a complete rotation of the Earth around its own axis. The waxing and waning of the moon specified the duration of a month. And the climatic fluctuations of the seasons separated the year into four different parts. For a long time people went along with the natural order. With the arrival of clocks and the precise measurement of time our way of organizing time changed, however. We measured out our lives ever less by the rhythms of nature and ever more by the ticking of the clock.

The perception of time is a very complex phenomenon. We have a subjective grasp of time, since we don’t have any specialist brain cells that can objectively measure the passing of time. We use calendars to give us an overview of the days, weeks and months. In most calendars the days, weeks and months are depicted in a linear fashion – the calendar begins on January 1st and ends on December 31st... and then bam! ... the year ends bang splat in the middle of the winter season – an obvious glitch in the calendar. In order to understand the whole thing better you can imagine the flow of the year as a circle and thereby hark back to our earlier understanding of time.

The year circle is... circular! Here everything returns – the days, the weeks, the months and the years. There’s no end and no beginning – just like in the cycles of nature.