Can you recommend a website, book, method, anything to help my 6-year old god-daughter understand the concept of Time?
She doesn’t get yet the concept of hours, minutes, days of the week, months, difference between “tomorrow” and next ____-day, etc.
For example, I’ve told her on a Thursday that I would pick her up for the beach on the next Saturday. The next day on Friday I get a call that she’s up and ready to go.
Or I’ve told her that I would pick her up at her house at, say, 12 PM and then she’ll call at 9 AM asking where I am.
One time, I cancelled a plan to go to a movie and told her that we’ll go an hour later; whereupon she threw a fit, not realizing how soon an hour would arrive.
As I’m typing this, it occurs to me that maybe it’s just a matter of putting her in front of a clock or calendar and going through it with her. Well, I’m open to any other ideas.
My four year old thinks of days in terms of “sleeps”. He doesn’t know how long a “day” is, but he understands that it is “two more sleeps before we go to Nana’s house.” (He came up with that with no help from me, but it works pretty well.) That might help your daughter. And maybe describe an hour as “one Sesame Street” or “two Little Einsteins” or something.
This is pretty much the method I’ve used with all three of my kids.
For shorter periods of time, try buying a kitchen timer. When your daughter asks you to, for instance, read to her, set the timer. Tell her “When this timer beeps, in 10 minutes, we’ll read”. If she’s playing and you need her to clean up soon, set a timer and tell her, “When the timer beeps, in 15 minutes, it’ll be time to clean up”.
At first, just use the timer for stuff that’s not carved in stone, so she can get a good “feeling” for how long 5 minutes or 15 minutes is. Once she has a feeling for it, it can be used for more important things, like “I’m setting the timer for 10 minutes; when it beeps, it’ll be time to turn off the TV and put on your shoes and brush your hair so we can leave for the bus stop” (or whatever).
Heh, for my boy we’d use TV time: “When are we going?” “In about 3 SpongeBobs.” I think a spongebob cartoon was around 15 minutes long, so we’d be leaving in 45 minutes. We also used a timer, and how-many-nite-nites.
I am surprised a child of 6 hasn’t grasped these ideas yet, but all kids aren’t the same.
When my kids were very young, I bought them each a calendar to hang on their bedroom wall. The last thing each night before tucking them in was to have them cross off their day on the calendar. After about a year, I started writing special things on their calendars, like birthdays, vacations, whathaveyou. This really helped them grasp the concept of “days.”
My daughter is six years old. I taught her back when she was three about how the earth revolves about an axis and orbits the sun. Understanding we are moving, and that the day and year are just a measurement of how long something took to travel a certain distance, because she understood that it takes time to go from one place to another. I used some fruit, a flashlight, and some web pages.
Youtube can be helpful for teaching minutes. There are some great Sesame Street videos out there. Once I explained that the one number is the total time and the other is how much time has gone by since it started, that helped her understand about minutes.
Some people don’t internalize time well. The counting sleeps idea is good; that is still the way I define my own personal day.
Hell, I know adults who could use some lessons as well!
I know a Kindergarten teacher and he (yes, a guy!) uses hour glasses, large and small, to start teaching the concept of time. The kids are fascinated with the hour glasses, and when he flips it for nap time, art time, play time, etc. the kids glance over to see how much sand is left and amazingly don’t complain about something ending or starting - the sand is gone, so time is up or the sand isn’t gone, so it isn’t time yet. One of his favorite comments was a little girl who was eager to start some project and said, “that sand is really slow today.”
Sometimes this is a matter of not understanding time related concepts, but sometimes it is a question of not liking them. It is not unheard of for a child under the age of reason or right at the cusp of it to decide that if she gets dressed and makes all the necessary preparations to go to the beach, this will then cause it to be time to go to the beach. Sometimes parents, not realizing what is going on, just roll with this – which makes it all the harder for the kid to get the concept of time. Some kids can become quite annoyed when it turns out not to work quite that way.
The best way to teach time though involves tying it to concrete, fixed occurrences which matter to the child – before lunch and after lunch, before dinner and after dinner, before sleep and after sleep, before school and after school. My kids didn’t get a firm grasp on weeks until they went to school (school week/weekend) and didn’t really get the progression of days of the week until they started having footie practice on specific days, though they understood both these things in the abstract.
For months you have to point to regular occurences like Christmas, birthdays, and the like, though I recommend a Sendak book called “Chicken Soup with Rice” for this. Also, teaching the seasons is a good start on months.