“I’ll be there in one minute!”
That’s my standard mom answer to almost any question. “Mom, will you wipe me?” One minute. “Mom, will you make snack?” One minute. “Mom will you…”
“Just give me a minute!”
But my “minute” is not a real minute. Nope. I rarely mean 60 seconds when I say “give me a minute,” and I started to feel a little guilty when my kids started asking how long a minute was…so I decided to show them (-:
Invitation to Learn about Time
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We started our investigation by observing the one-minute timer (that’s what started this whole process to begin with), and I taught my kids a fun little game from my childhood known as “the quiet game”, familiar with it? 😉 Basically, I flipped over the one-minute timer and challenged my kids to stay quiet for an entire minute. I really wanted them to feel what a minute felt like- all distractions aside.
They failed miserably. Despite my three year old’s attempt to literally hold his tongue, and my four year old covering his mouth, they were pretty giggly and took it as a challenge to make each other laugh. It was actually pretty funny!
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Once I felt like they had a good handle on how long a minute really was, we moved on to investigating the other sand timers.
We let the sand simultaneously fall in each one and ordered them from shortest time to longest, we continued trying to play the quiet game with each timer, and we predicted how long it would take to do simple tasks (read our favorite book, put away our shoes, walk around the entire house, etc.)
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Time is an abstract concept that can be really difficult for kids to understand, but I hope that by using these sand timers frequently, my kids will have a better understanding of how long a minute really is.
And I promise not to use the word “minute” so liberally anymore 🙂
Pin this idea for a later time….haha- see what I did there? 😉
Nice idea to use the sand timers – much more “real” than learning about time by learning to read a clock face. Now if you could only tell me how to teach patience 🙂