Hellobee Boards

DS is almost 3. I think he gets some things like tomorrow and the weekend and soon. He might understand 5 minutes, since I often tell him he has 5 minutes to do something.

DD is 3.5 and she's just starting to really understand time. She's pretty good about the days of the week, and she understands yesterday, today, tomorrow, but longer stretches of time (weeks, months) are hard to understand. For minutes, hours, etc... we'll explain what the time on the clock will say. So I'll say, "right now, it is 6:00. In 30 minutes we need to get ready for bed; the clock will say 6:30." We use the same concept looking at the calendar, but big chunks of time just seem to be more challenging to her.

I teach second and most of my students have a good grasp of all these concepts. The thing that a lot of them struggle with is events in the future. If we have a field trip or school activity coming up in several weeks, I get questions every day about whether it's today or tomorrow. They have a hard time gauging how long it will take for it to be that day.

ETA: I also get questions about whether I knew Abraham Lincoln when he was alive. I'm going to go with the distant past is a pretty abstract concept, not that I look old enough to have hung out with Abe.

@mrbee: She has an alarm clock in her room (the type that has a stoplight to show when it's ok to get up) so we practice the time either with that or with the analog clock on my phone. I think 4 is the right age developmentally to start understanding time, though, so it seems like our kids are right on track!

@Honeybee: Great advice!

Lala can articulate time (next month, next year, last week) but it's not always clear to me that she has a concrete understanding of what that means.

Another example is that she'll use the thermometer and then say "Your temperature is 98.7 or 97.8" but when you press her about it, I'm not really sure she knows what ninety is or what a decimal point means.

She's such a language kid that she picks up on the patterns of what we say... whether it means to her what it means to us, I'm not sure so I'd love to try some of these clock skills to better assess her understanding.

She has no clue. But she knows the words "minutes", "yesterday" and "Thursday" so if I ask her when something had happened, she says ant if the above.