The Little Rabbits, heroes of Alan Baker's series of colorful picture books, get through their busy day at a slight disadvantage: They don't know how to tell time.
But they are learning. On every page of the latest volume, "Little Rabbits' First Time Book" (Kingfisher, $10.95), they have three clocks to guide them.One is an analog clock with the hands drawn in place at the appropriate time: 9 o'clock for housework, noon for lunch, 5 o'clock for the much-anticipated arrival of a dinner guest, Gray Rabbit. One is a digital clock that tells the same time. The third -- which is visible through a big circle cut into each page -- is another analog clock, this one with movable arms. That way, the reader can make it match the time in the story (or not -- it's a personal choice).
Analog clocks have been part of books like this one for decades, movable arms and all. The digital clock seems like a good addition, though. Digital clocks are the reason that small children now say things that nobody else does, like "it's 2:58" instead of "it's 3 o'clock," or "it's 7:43" instead of "it's time for bed."
They say those things because, thanks to digital clocks, a child who can read numerals can tell you what time it is.
But, cautions Robert Seigler, that's not the same thing as telling time. Telling time involves learning new concepts -- the relationship between minutes and hours, the way that hours progress. That learning doesn't happen quickly or early and it probably doesn't happen with a digital clock.
"Typically, children first learn to tell the hours, then the half-hours," said Seigler, author of "Emerging Minds" (Oxford University Press, 1996) and "Children's Thinking" (Prentice Hall, 1998). He is a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "That typically happens in second grade, and a lot of children are able to do that long before anything else. The quarter-hours come next."
It can take quite a while to reach another stage, counting the minutes by fives. Next, children learn to decide whether to count forward or backward from the hour ("It's 20 past 3," "It's 20 to 4"). Finally, they learn to add minutes in a meaningful way, not just because they are part of a digital read-out. "It's really not until third grade that most people learn to tell time in general," Seigler said.
Still, younger children may enjoy experimenting with time-telling. "Kids may be interested in clocks the same way they are interested in cars, as a part of the adult world," he said.
That's why books that have clocks with movable hands, or toy clocks that children can manipulate, are fun. They may even help prepare children to learn to tell time down the road. The "Little Rabbits" book may be helpful in a similar way, because it makes a connection between the easy-to-read digital clock and the trickier analog face, which children can't read until they start to grasp the concept behind it.
Even when that happens, don't assume that telling time is the same thing as understanding time, said Seigler. He didn't introduce time-telling to his own children until they were about 6 years old.
"Being able to read a clock doesn't mean a child will come in from playing just because it's dinnertime. It doesn't mean the child will get ready for bed without a parent's reminder," he said.
Learning to associate the clock with certain activities takes longer. Television can be a good motivator; knowing what time a favorite program comes on can help a child learn to figure out how to tell that time first, building the skill to read other times. (Fortunately, TV shows start at the hour or the half-hour, the first time-telling skills to develop.)
Even the child who can tell time, however, still is developing a sense of "how long" something is. In fact, adults may have trouble assessing that, too. "Both children and adults undergo an interesting phenomenon in their experience of time," Seigler explained. "If there is a lot going on, and you're interested, time seems to go quickly while you are living it. But when you remember it, it seems like it took quite a while, because so much happened.
"It's the opposite when we are confronted with boring situations. In retrospect, it seems that very little time passed. But while it's happening, it seems that time is going very, very slowly."
In other words, even after your child has learned to tell time, you can still look forward to many, many renditions of the old question, "Are we there yet?"
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