The Importance of Telling Time in the Early Years

Online, August 26, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Telling time is a very important concept in the early childhood years. Knowing about the exact time and elapsed time helps children in a variety of ways - not just when they are young but also when they get older. It is important for adults to also concentrate on this skill in preschoolers. More than reading, writing, counting and knowing how to coordinate body muscles, telling time has a lot of skills that are put into practice once the young one starts learning about clocks, hours, minutes and seconds.

The concept of telling time can actually be seen as an umbrella topic that encapsulates an assortment of cognitive skills that should be developed in the early years. At the outset, the most highlighted skill in telling time is identifying what elapsed time is in an analog clock more than a digital clock. Here, children learn to match what was taught to them when they are introduced to the idea that the long hand means minutes, the short hand means hours and the running hand means seconds. Being that a specific position means a particular time of day or night, children learn to match numbers and hours to give the time of day.

Learning all about telling time and elapsed time exercises a child's ability to skip count by fives. Given that a clock has distinguishing numbers from one to twelve and has five marks in between, children learn that when you count minutes you count from "five-ten-fifteen-twenty" until you get to sixty. They understand that when you count hours, you do ordinal counting from one to twelve - but when the concept of minutes is involved, you automatically switch to skip counting by fives to get to the right time. This is a very important skill, but the prerequisite of this is to learn how to skip count by 2s and 3s.

Telling the time and elapsed time teaching gives children an abstract idea of how much time has passed them by. This is best exampled before play, when they are aware of the fact that they started at a particular time and then once they finish they have ended their play at yet another particular time. With this, they can backtrack telling time and elapsed time to know how many minutes they have spent playing. You will see the reactions to this such as "Oh, I didn't know I was playing that long!" or "What, you mean it has only been five minutes? But it feels like such a long time!" after they have packed away.

Indeed, the concept of time holds many smaller skill sets which also develop as the child masters basic time concepts. Should he be introduced to the concept of time at a younger age, the higher the likelihood that he will be able to gauge and estimate in different applied situations more adeptly. This is why the concept of time is an integral part of the early childhood curriculum and is a must for lifelong learning.

Telling time: http://www.mathnook.com/teachingtools.html and elapsed time: http://www.mathnook.com/teachingtools.html are two important math concepts best taken up in early childhood to prepare young ones for greater learning in the future.