Some events like a birthday or a holiday occur only once a year. Grocery shopping occurs more often, while eating takes place three or four times daily.
The regularity of these events helps children acquire an internal clock about when things will happen.
Preschoolers can participate in some planning for future events. Such planning will teach two related time concepts:
1. The past, present, and future are separated by time.
2. There is a need sometimes to delay gratification of one’s expectations and desires.
Some children have difficulty organizing events in time.
Activities to promote good time organization at the preschool level can be incorporated into daily events such as dressing, using songs and rhymes, or helping with a daily chore.
Routine activities of daily living, such as dressing or bathing, involve the sequencing of events in time.
Children who dress themselves may occasionally put on shoes before socks. Or they omit underpants because they have not followed the correct sequential order.
Discovery of an omission or error is a learning experience.
Equally valuable is the planning, in advance, of what clothes to put on and in what order.
For example, you tell your child to select what he would like to wear tomorrow. Then, he places these items in a row on the bed: what comes first, what comes next, what follows this, and so on.
Songs that have a theme that is repeated have always been popular with young children, and have stories that have a line that reoccurs. (“Little pig, little pig, let me in!”)
“The Farmer in the Dell” is an example. The story unfolds in a sequence, while there is a constant, the farmer, who makes decisions about whom to “take.”
Rhyming and rhythms have the same role—to teach about events in time.
The Dr. Seuss books, for example, often don't make a lot of sense to a young child. But he likes the sounds and the beats which occur in patterns through time.
Star-Brite Learning Program
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