How to help young children understand time

"How long until my birthday?" "Is it Christmas tomorrow?" For a three- or four-year-old, time is a strange thing: you can feel it, but you can't see it. Words like yesterday and tomorrow come early; a sense of how long a week or a year is comes much later.

One simple way to help is to make time visible: put it on a wall, in a line, where a child can touch it.

Why a normal calendar isn't enough

The calendar adults use splits the year into twelve grids, one per page or one per box. That's handy for us; for a child it's a puzzle. 31 January and 1 February are next to each other in real life, but far apart on paper, often on different pages. And when you turn the page, the past months disappear.

A ribbon calendar lines up every day of the year, one after another, on a single large sheet. Time becomes a road: you can see where you started, where you are today and how far there is to go.

Five habits that work

1. Find "today" every morning

A peg, a magnet or a sticker that moves one box a day. It's the most important habit: the child sees that time always moves in the same direction, one step at a time.

2. Count the days with a finger

"How long until Emma's birthday?" Put a finger on today and count the boxes to the cake icon. At first there are lots and you count together; later they learn to estimate: "it's on the next row, so it's a long way".

3. Notice the colour of the season

If each season has a colour, children notice the change before they can name it: "we're in the green, the yellow is coming, then the beach". And they link the colour to real things: leaves, cold, holidays.

4. Mark the good things that are coming

Grandparents' birthdays, a trip, a cousin's visit, the first day of school. The more dates from their own life are on the calendar, the more it becomes theirs, and the more they want to look at it.

5. Look back, not only forward

At the end of each month, walk back along the road: "here we went to the beach, here Grandma came". Keeping the past visible helps them understand that time is one continuous line.

Where to hang it

At the child's eye level, not the grown-ups': they need to be able to touch it. The bedroom works, but a place you pass every day, like the kitchen or the hallway, works even better.

Where this calendar comes from

I designed it for my own children when they were three, starting from a spreadsheet, and I've reprinted it every year since. This site does the same thing in a minute: pick the year, add your family's birthdays and dates, download the PDF and print it at home on A4 sheets or at a print shop as a poster.

Make your own year calendar, free. Open the calendar maker →