Young Children - May 2008 - (Page 15) chronicling recent events, they can revisit and discuss past shared events. Along these same lines, the teacher can collect samples of children’s work in a notebook as a visual record of shared events. Children can take turns contributing work to this community notebook. When teachers encourage children to tell peers or their families the story of their project, the children strengthen their understanding of the way an event unfolds, with the various activities taking place in a time sequence. Games Games are another way for children to begin to get a feel for the length of various units of time and the vocabulary associated with them. For example, children might guess how many seconds it takes to walk from one side of the playground to the other, and the teacher or another child can time it with a watch. Or a teacher might ask the children to guess how many minutes it will take for a snowball to melt indoors and then time it with a clock. They might guess how many hours it will be until story time, tally the hours as they pass, and then compare the result with their estimate. These experiences with units of time (seconds, minutes, hours) can lead to discussions about points in time during the school day and the relative distance in the future of these points in time. For example, the teacher might say, “We are going to the library at nine o’clock, and we will go outside at ten o’clock. Where are we going first?” Project work Project work, in which children actively engage in ongoing investigations of events and phenomena around them, is another way to give children opportunities to acquire many concepts and skills related to time (Helm & Beneke, 2003). In project work, calendar concepts are useful rather than ritualistic in nature. Project work lends itself to planning future events and keeping a record of events that happen over time. For example, in a mixed-age preschool, the children investigated eggs. They incubated mallard duck eggs, and each day they added to a tally of days until the ducklings would hatch. As children plan for investigation and reflect on what they have learned and when they learned it in the meaningful context of a project, they naturally begin to develop a sense of the relative lengths of time in the past and future. Richard Graessle/© NAEYC Documentation displays Displaying documentation of shared class events can lead to meaningful discussions that involve time-linked vocabulary. For example, when looking at a documentation display about the class construction of a giant papiermâché butterfly, one child said, “See, there’s the butterfly we made that other time.” Her teacher responded, “Yes, we made the giant butterfly two weeks ago. Here [pointing to a photograph on the display] is a picture of the frame we built the first day, and the picture next to it shows you adding the papier-mâché on the second day.” Intellectual development and calendar time A teacher’s actions can enhance or inhibit young children’s learning. Communication, classroom support, activities, and interactions all play a part. If young children participate frequently in activities they do not really understand, they may lose confidence in their intellectual powers. In this case, some children may eventually give up hope of understanding many of the ideas teachers present to them. Certainly all children will experience some degree of not fully understanding activities at some point. Linear representations Linear representations also can help children begin to understand and conceptualize that a day is a unit of time and talk about it with increasing clarity. For example, to count the number of days they have been in kindergarten, children can add a link to a paper chain each day, or number a pattern of colored Post-it notes and place them on the classroom wall, or add a Unifix cube to a stack of cubes. The teacher can emphasize time-linked vocabulary, such as before, after, later, earlier, as the children add the new link. Unlike calendars, linear representations do not require the left-to-right orientation. Project work lends itself to planning future events and keeping a record of events that happen over time. Young Children • May 2008 15
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