Teaching a kid to navigate in time is not so easy, because young children have no concept of "time" as such. They live with feelings, emotions, but not for days, weeks and months. Where do you start?
If an adult can be guided by the "internal" clock, the baby must first master the time by an ordinary clock. But how to do this, because even the concepts of "yesterday", "today" and "tomorrow" are vaguely understood by him.
How to teach your toddler to understand time
You should not try to instill a sense of time in a child under three years old, since he will not yet understand what you want from him. But when the child is three years old or more, it is necessary to try to instill in him a sense and concept of time in an explanatory and entertaining form. It should be noted that children who live according to the daily routine strictly prescribed by their parents are able to quickly learn the concept of time. When the baby lives according to the routine, he knows that after breakfast he goes for a walk, after lunch he goes to rest and so on. A kind of concept of time has already been formed in his mind. Now all that remains is to correct the children's understanding of this category.
The first thing to do is to show which numbers the arrow is on at the time when the baby sits down for breakfast, lunch, dinner, in general, refer to the clock throughout the day. When the child remembers that he is having lunch at one in the afternoon and has dinner at eight in the evening, you can continue learning.
In order to avoid confusion, it is recommended that the child be taught by the clock exclusively with arrows; it is undesirable to use a clock with Arabic numerals. To explain what “hour”, “minute”, “second” are, you can refer to the words “very quickly”, “quickly”, “long”. It is necessary for the baby to clearly remember that the short hand points to the hours, and the long one to the minutes. When the child learns this, it will become much easier to navigate in time.
Days of the week and seasons are also times
In order to master the concept of time, it is not only necessary to teach the baby to understand by the clock, but also to understand the days, weeks, months. You can remember the days of the week according to the regime type, namely: every day of the week should be associated with an event in the child. If the whole family gathers at home, then it’s Saturday, if the baby goes to the puppet theater, park, zoo and so on with mom and dad, then it’s Sunday. Every day of the week is a certain association. After a while, the child will remember all days of the week by name.
It is not necessary to study months at an early preschool age; it is enough to limit yourself to the seasons. It will be very easy for the baby to do this, since each time the child causes a certain number of feelings and emotions. So little by little it will turn out to teach the child to orientate in time, which will have a beneficial effect on his general development.
