Teachers of young children currently find themselves in something of a dilemma in relation to the teaching of time. Their own experience and the general perceptions of practitioners tell them that time is a difficult concept, and that the children they teach cannot be expected to understand it. Attempts to teach children to 'tell the time' and to teach about the past frequently result in misconceptions, inaccuracies and 'howlers' of all kinds. On the other hand, they have a National Curriculum with chronology as a central feature.(DfE, 1995) This clearly involves a sound grasp of different temporal concepts and an extensive range of skills in the measurement of time. How can these different perspectives be reconciled? If teachers continue to believe that children have no understanding of time, they will make only tokenistic efforts to teach it, and thus have little real impact upon children's learning.

The main focus of this research has been to look closely at children’s perceptions of time as it occurs in story in order to attempt to throw some light on the positive features of their awareness, rather than to focus upon what they cannot understand. Children's fiction has been used as a starting point, since many picture books intended for very young children, make surprisingly sophisticated demands upon the reader's temporal awareness. Fiction makes considerable use of time as a literary device, using time leaps, time travel, and juxtaposing different time frames, and is therefore a useful vehicle for stimulating children's thoughts. A supposition which underlies the research, therefore, is that if children can appreciate these books, then talking about them might reveal a considerable amount about children's perceptions and enable more precise knowledge of their understanding.

Pat Hoodless
Didsbury School of Education
Manchester Metropolitan University