Many times we have experienced the sensation that our son does not understand the phrases of: wait a little, in five minutes I go, a moment that I now finish ... The truth is that in these situations what prevails is the child's lack of patience, but It would be interesting to put ourselves in his place and try to reflect on what these subjective references mean to him (since time is intangible and calculation without instruments depends on our mind).
We might think that Children are not able to understand the concept of time but I am going to share with you an experience that they had in a school in Menorca and that Vinçens Arnaiz, a great psychologist specializing in early childhood education, presented in a psychomotricity course.
They took a group of children from the second cycle of children to a beach and gave them a stick. The proposal was to make a line in the sand that represented their age, then the teacher was repeating lines with the same stick that represented the age of their parents, their grandparents, an emblematic house of the town, the medieval castle ... soon They realized that there was not enough beach to capture older dates.
One of the children proposed that he follow the line until the time of the dinosaurs and the teacher replied that they should finish that line on the Iberian Peninsula (taking a ferry before, of course).
I found this experience interesting because it seems that the concept of time is difficult to handle and present to children, but it is easy if it is done through metaphors or comparisons that are close to them.
At one point, a classmate of the teacher gave the stick to the children and proposed that they draw the teacher's age line. The children agreed that he should be older than the grandparents and when the two adults asked them why they had done so (after laughing for a while), the children responded that their teacher knew much more than their grandparents and that so much must be older. Jolin with the kids.
