“We
will have snack at 9:45, just like we do every day.”
“Yes,
but when will that be?”
“At
the end of math, and before music.”
“Oh,
ok!”
Children
from infancy on thrive in a predictable environment; the safety and
security of a set schedule leads to better self-management, more
effective learning time, and an overall sense of well-being.
Schedules and predictability all center around time: what we do, and
when, and in what order. Time is one of the most challenging, most
abstract concepts children must learn, and they do, but often not as
quickly as the adults in their lives would like! There are, however,
activities in which caretakers and teachers can engage young children
to ensure the swiftest development of a sense of time as possible.
Development
of Time Sense
Infants'
worlds center around their natural body rhythms, and it is through
their caretakers' responses (soothing when upset, feeding when
hungry, etc.) that babies are able to organize themselves, develop a
sense of security, and build routines (Poole, Miller, Church, 2006).
Children's understanding of time grows from this predictability that
begins in infancy. In a safe, secure, and predictable environment,
babies adjust to their family's use of time, and start to organize
themselves. Striking a balance between a baby's needs and a family's
needs is possible: flexibility within routine is the goal.
As
children move out of infancy, their routines are still generally
dominated by their biological needs (sleep, bathroom, eating), but
time becomes more marked by their daily routine. This continues to
be true until they leave the home and enter a more institutional
setting (daycare, preschool, or kindergarten). “Young children
depend on time sequences, and their daily routine enables them to
place themselves in time” (Mock, 1999). At home, a young child
feels a sense of security knowing that after breakfast, she goes
outside to play, and then comes back in for a snack. This is how she
tells time. In a classroom, a student remembers that after lunch
comes read-aloud, and then science time. This is how he tells time.
It is the job of teachers and families to help move children from a
solely routine-driven tracking of time to a combination of routine
and conventional tracking of time with clocks.
When
a child enters an institutional setting, she is faced with routines
that are not terribly sensitive to her biological and home routines.
She may not be hungry at “Snack,” or tired at “Quiet Time.”
While this transition from home to school can be a rough one,
teachers can soften the blow by ensuring that their classrooms run on
their own routine, so children continue to experience the security of
a schedule, even if it is a new one. The more consistent the
routine, the sooner children will adjust to it.
Preoperational
(roughly ages two to seven years) children, according to Piaget,
consistently confuse time with speed, space, and distance (Mock,
1999). As children develop a sense of time, they are able to
sequence familiar, relevant events first (their own morning routine,
the events in a favorite book or movie, etc.). However, it is not
until around the ages of six to eight that children become more aware
of the duration of time (Mock, 1999; Lee, Lee, & Fox,
2009).
By
ten or eleven, children have improved in their understanding of time,
particularly “long ago,” and the order of events in the past
(Harms & Lettow, 2007). Students are able to place events on a
timeline, compare chronology of events in relation to other events,
and generalize about a certain time period they have studied.
However, one cannot expect children to fully internalize time
concepts until middle school (Harms & Lettow, 2007)!
It
is the beginning of formal education outside the home (preschool,
daycare, or kindergarten)--when children are still very much
depending on routines for their sense of time--but are increasingly
being asked to participate in a world where conventional timekeeping
is the norm, that children seem to need the greatest patience and
scaffolding from the adults in their lives.
Support
of Time Sense Development
There
is much families and teachers can do to ensure children are operating
at optimal levels in the development of their sense of time,
particularly in the first few years of formal education.
Create
a routine that works best for the setting in which the child finds
himself (classroom, small daycare, grandma's house, etc.) that also
accommodates and respects his needs. Ensure there is flexibility in
the schedule, but that the schedule is largely the same (i.e.,
bed-time is always at seven, regardless of the day of the week, but
some nights we play a game, some nights we watch a show, etc.). This
develops trust, security, and a sense of safety, and opens the child
up to the notion that there can be other routines in other settings.
Children
should be given the opportunity to stick with an activity or task
until they finish it; when we tear children away from their important
work, they fail to develop a sense of how long it takes them to
complete a task (Mock, 1999). If a student must be moved on from a
task that has not reached its natural end, letting her know a few
minutes before the transition will allow her to adjust to the change
(Poole et al., 2006).
Music
is a way of keeping time! Play clapping games, sing songs, and have
fun with rhythm. Patterns and sequences also help children develop a
sense of the rhythms of time in the short term and over years and
through the life cycle (Honig, 2006).
A
monthly calendar is a staple in nearly every primary classroom; it is
incumbent upon teachers to fully utilize this tool to help children
develop a sense of their place in time. Daily calendar time,
answering the the questions “What day was it yesterday? What day is
it today? What day will it be tomorrow?” (Montessori, 1965), and
counting days until special events help children understand the
passage of time (Mock, 1999; Church, 2005; Lee, et al., 2009).
Tracking the passage of seasons, life events (birthdays, loss of
teeth), and holidays all bring community and culture into the
classroom as well as help children mark time (Mock, 1999). The
use of a “rolling calendar” (Mock, 1999) is also a powerful
instructional tool that firmly embeds children in their classroom,
community, and time: using a roll of paper, mark off a space for
each day, and children take turns illustrating important activities
of the day. This allows them to remember important classroom events
and understand the passage of time.
Just
as important as helping children track longer periods of time like
weeks and months, it is essential for children's development of time
sense and sense of security to post and refer to a daily schedule.
Further, teachers should post clock face times along with the daily
schedule to facilitate the transition from routine-based timekeeping
to conventional timekeeping and use sequential language (first, then,
later, etc.) to describe the day's events (Mock, 1999; Lee, et al.,
2009): “First we have snack at 10:00, then we will play outside,
and after that is math centers.” Lee, Lee, and Fox (2009)
recommend also enlisting students to help create a photographic
schedule to accompany the picture/word schedule. Posting this at
child height, and labeling each picture, not only allows children to
answer their own “Teacher, when do we...?” questions, but also
reinforces left to right reading, using pictures to support text, and
reminds children of the general routine of the day.
Classrooms
should also make use of a wide variety of both standard and
nonstandard time measuring tools (timers, clocks, stopwatches,
metronomes, hourglasses, etc.) to help children develop a sense of
the passage of time (Mock, 1999; Lee et al., 2009). Allowing
students time to explore and compare events and nonstandard units of
time (length of a song, faucet drips, etc.) opens their eyes to the
rhythms, patterns, and beats of time and their lives (Mock, 1999; Lee
et al., 2009). Finally, playing a modified version of Montessori's
“Silence Game,” (Mock, 1999) or similar quiet, focused activity,
helps children develop notions of what a minute, two minutes, or five
minutes are.
The
daily schedule and monthly calendar, the tracking of the seasons and
passage of months, all firmly connect time to a child's own life;
time must be relevant to a young child in order for her to pay
attention to it (Lee, et al., 2009). Children could work with their
families to make daily personal timelines (essentially a schedule),
as well as family history books (picture albums), which will help a
child find her place in time (Mock, 1999). It is important for
educators to remember that children do have “built-in”
timekeepers that they bring with them to school, and they do work;
children use the passage of day and night, temperature and weather,
television shows to monitor time in their own lives (Figueras,
Hardin, Jones, 2005). Additionally, different cultures track and
value time differently. For example, in one Mexican community, most
families relied on the bus schedule to know when to leave for work,
when to have the midday meal, and when to wake up: the bus would
drive through town at 5:00 a.m. honking its horn to signal the
beginning of the day (Figueras et al., 2005)!
Teachers
and caretakers should, when talking about time, use the most accurate
language as possible: if a teacher is asking a child to wait “just
a minute,” the child should wait only about a minute (Mock, 1999;
Lee et al., 2009). How is a child going to develop an inner sense of
how long five minutes is, if she is told that recess will be in five
minutes, but it stretches into ten minutes of waiting?
Finally,
in teaching young children how to read a clock, which precedes a more
comprehensive understanding of time, teachers should use a digital
clock alongside an analog clock, and clocks should be at child
height, rather than high up on the wall as they usually are (Lee et
al., 2009). Van de Walle (2004) recommends beginning with a clock
that only has an hour hand (break the minute hand off an old clock),
and students should practice telling time thus: “it is about
9:00,” “it is nearly 3:00.” When students have a good
grasp on telling time to the hour, then combine the hour-hand only
clock with another clock that has a minute hand: children can begin
to see the connection between where the minute hand is and “about”
o'clock times. Finally, practice reading the minute hand in
five-minute intervals, but only after the hour has been established.
Remember, the idea is for young children to see the importance of
time, the relevance in their own lives, and for them to develop an
inner sense of time, not for them to be able to perfectly read a
clock.
I
initially embarked on this course of inquiry to find out why my
second graders, and my own two children, have such a nebulous concept
of time, and what more can be done to mitigate this area of
difficulty. I found that I—as a teacher and as a parent—was
doing everything right, although there are more components that I can
add, particularly in my classroom (routine in pictures, using a
digital clock, etc.). I learned that my larger question—why don't
children remember that they need to perform a certain task at a
certain time!?--is a more complex question than “how can I help
children gain a better sense of time?” It appears that prospective
memory—remembering to do something at a certain time—is in part
event-based (routine-driven), and so depends largely on firmly
establishing a routine. Remembering to do something out of the
normal routine, without prompts, is a function that generally is not
well established until adulthood, and has little to do with “time
sense,” and is more an executive function of the brain (Mantyla,
Carelli, Forman, 2006), which can be expected to fully mature well
after adults start expecting children to perform these tasks.
Overall,
there is much families and teachers can do to help children develop a
strong sense of time. Perhaps the most important thing we must
remember, however, is to provide a safe, predictable environment, and
wait for normal development to occur!
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