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LEARNING ABOUT TIME TAKES TIME
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It’s back to school time. Parents set their alarm clocks and wake up their little ones so they can get them to school on time. Pre-school, kindergarten and first and second graders move at a pace of their own choosing, but pushed along by their time conscious parents. These children understand the words “hurry” and “going to be late,” but that’s about it. While they have a sense of the order of when things happen – wake up, eat breakfast, get dressed, leave the house, take the bus or carpool, arrive at school –their concept of time is still abstract. Tell little children to be ready in five minutes, and chances are that unless you are supervising them, not much happened when you show up five minutes later. But tell them to get ready now, and you might have more success.
According J.A. Banks and C.A. Banks in their book Teaching Strategies For The Social Studies: Decision-Making And Citizen Action, the “development of a mature sense of time and chronology is a slow, complex, sequential, and cumulative task.” They explain that young children don’t have the needed experiences to be able to relate contextually to time, that as they grow they accumulate more relationship concepts which help them place events and actions with the passage of time.
How we learn about time is through successive experiences, and while you can speed up the process with more aggressive attention to time, the telling of time, and the conceptualizing of time, there are generally regarded stages to learning about time.
Children go from learning the concept of “now” by the time they are 2 to 2 ½ to a better understanding of sequence, frequency, rhythm and duration a year later. By the time they are 4 they have an understanding of the sequence of daily events, as in when things happen or are supposed to happen.
By 5 they grasp the ideas of early and late, and can relate a clock to a daily schedule. Some children can start telling time on a clock. They know the difference between past and future. They get a sense of what a calendar is for.
It is during the ages of 7 to 10 that children gain competence in clocks and calendars. By 10 and 11, they have a real sense of the chronology of past events.
These timelines of when children grasp the concepts of time are not for every “normal” child. Some perfectly intelligent children take longer to understand time concepts fully. Some philosophers would even argue that we never fully comprehend time.
We at Symmetricom spend almost all of our time perfecting products that offer precise and reliable time and frequency to optimize the performance in highly advanced technology. In fact, we like to think that education about time keeping and its importance to all aspects of your life is an ongoing educational endeavor. While we can’t answer the existential questions of when time began, we do offer information about the growing need for nanosecond time sync technology. That’s why we write white papers on the subject of time synchronization As well as create data sheets that go beyond just the features of the products, but the reasons they will help your IT enterprise. To read these materials, visit our download library.
And while we can’t synchronize your household to get your children to school on time, we can synchronize your IT systems to make sure everything else stays on time.
According J.A. Banks and C.A. Banks in their book Teaching Strategies For The Social Studies: Decision-Making And Citizen Action, the “development of a mature sense of time and chronology is a slow, complex, sequential, and cumulative task.” They explain that young children don’t have the needed experiences to be able to relate contextually to time, that as they grow they accumulate more relationship concepts which help them place events and actions with the passage of time.
How we learn about time is through successive experiences, and while you can speed up the process with more aggressive attention to time, the telling of time, and the conceptualizing of time, there are generally regarded stages to learning about time.
Children go from learning the concept of “now” by the time they are 2 to 2 ½ to a better understanding of sequence, frequency, rhythm and duration a year later. By the time they are 4 they have an understanding of the sequence of daily events, as in when things happen or are supposed to happen.
By 5 they grasp the ideas of early and late, and can relate a clock to a daily schedule. Some children can start telling time on a clock. They know the difference between past and future. They get a sense of what a calendar is for.
It is during the ages of 7 to 10 that children gain competence in clocks and calendars. By 10 and 11, they have a real sense of the chronology of past events.
These timelines of when children grasp the concepts of time are not for every “normal” child. Some perfectly intelligent children take longer to understand time concepts fully. Some philosophers would even argue that we never fully comprehend time.
We at Symmetricom spend almost all of our time perfecting products that offer precise and reliable time and frequency to optimize the performance in highly advanced technology. In fact, we like to think that education about time keeping and its importance to all aspects of your life is an ongoing educational endeavor. While we can’t answer the existential questions of when time began, we do offer information about the growing need for nanosecond time sync technology. That’s why we write white papers on the subject of time synchronization As well as create data sheets that go beyond just the features of the products, but the reasons they will help your IT enterprise. To read these materials, visit our download library.
And while we can’t synchronize your household to get your children to school on time, we can synchronize your IT systems to make sure everything else stays on time.
