Calendar in attendance sheet

Hi,
I am rather new to excel, and still trying to figure out most things.
However, there is a task to make interactive calendar with shaded weekends that change depending of the month for the attendance list. The doc is made already by someone else, and I need to update it, but do not know how to activate the box with Jan-Dec months, and make the rest of the blank fields to automatically change depending on number of days in a month and weekends (with weekends shaded). Uh this is even difficult to describe let alone make it happen.
Any suggestions, tips, how to start? Also, formulas are still too difficult for me, so would not mind any suggestions on them too as I understand this is related with conditional formatting..
Thanks