Temporal awareness is a child's internal sense of timing that allows them to understand rhythm and the sequence of events. It is a fundamental perceptual-motor skill that helps children coordinate movement with time, such as knowing when to catch a ball or how long a minute feels compared to ten minutes.
From catching a ball to tying their shoes, children need to master the basics of temporal awareness to interact with their environment. As a key building block of perceptual-motor skills, it helps children learn, grow, and move confidently. This article explains the importance of temporal awareness, its impact on coordination, and activities you can use to build this essential skill.
Why is temporal awareness important for children?
Temporal awareness is important because it directly impacts a child's coordination, ability to learn, and understanding of the world. It helps children recognize patterns in time, like the difference between day and night, and unite visual information with physical movements.
- Learning and language: Research shows that understanding rhythms in speech improves a child's grasp of grammar and helps them sort language into words and phrases.
- Hand-eye coordination: This skill is essential for performing tasks that require the simultaneous use of hands and eyes.
- Foot-eye coordination: This ability is necessary for daily functions like walking, running, and climbing stairs.
Strong temporal awareness enables children to feel more confident and safe while engaging in physical activities and exploring new environments.
Activities Across Developmental Domains
A free guide with activity ideas that foster child development across developmental domains.
How does temporal awareness affect hand-eye coordination?
Hand-eye coordination is the ability to perform activities that require using your hands and eyes together. This skill begins in infancy when babies grasp objects and develops to include tasks like stacking blocks, snapping buttons, and tying shoes.
Without a developed sense of temporal awareness, children can struggle to recognize timing patterns, which can negatively impact their hand-eye coordination. This may affect their ability to perform basic self-care activities, like dressing themselves, or academic tasks, like writing their name. Difficulties in this area can discourage children from being active, which is why it's important to provide fun ways to practice these skills.
What are some activities to improve hand-eye coordination?
While temporal awareness develops naturally through play, educators and families can use fun games to help children practice and improve their coordination.
- Throwing and catching a ball: Start by rolling a ball before moving to tossing. Use age-appropriate balls and vary the sizes as skills improve.
- Bowling: Set up child-sized bowling pins (or plastic bottles) and have children take turns rolling a ball to knock them over.
- Puzzles: Puzzles enhance hand-eye coordination while also building problem-solving and shape recognition skills.
- Drawing and writing: Any activity using fingers and eyes together, from scribbling to writing, helps practice hand-eye coordination.
- Building blocks: Using LEGOs, stackable wooden blocks, or large foam blocks promotes fine motor skills and focus.
- Balloon toss: Keeping a balloon in the air requires children to use their eyes, hands, and feet, improving reaction time and coordination.
Using an app like brightwheel’s daily activity report feature allows providers to easily record these activities and developmental milestones, keeping families updated on their child’s progress.
How can you improve foot-eye coordination?
Foot-eye coordination is the ability to use your eyes and feet together for activities like walking, running, or climbing stairs. This skill is vital for a child's physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development, especially when movement is paired with music.
Like hand-eye coordination, this ability is a direct product of temporal awareness. You can improve it with activities that encourage children to move and use their feet.
- Kicking a ball back and forth
- Playing hopscotch
- Jumping rope
- Dancing to music
How does temporal awareness relate to other perceptual motor skills?
Coordination and timing are key aspects of temporal awareness, but they are part of a larger set of perceptual motor skills children need to navigate their world. Other essential skills include:
- Body awareness: Understanding how their bodies move.
- Spatial awareness: Recognizing how much space their body takes up relative to other objects and people.
Together, these skills help children move confidently and encourage them to stay active. Temporal awareness is a foundational piece of this process that you can reinforce by teaching the physical and mental aspects of timing and rhythm.
Frequently asked questions
Q: What is the main goal of teaching temporal awareness?
A: The main goal is to help children understand the relationship between time, rhythm, and movement so they can better predict outcomes, like catching a ball or knowing when an event will happen.
Q: How can I explain time concepts to a young child?
A: Use concrete and literal language to describe time. For example, relate time to specific activities ("We'll go outside after one more story") and use terms like "fast" and "slow" during physical play to build a frame of reference.
Q: At what age does temporal awareness start developing?
A: Temporal awareness begins to develop in infancy as babies start to anticipate routines, like feeding times, and continues to refine throughout early childhood as they engage in more complex movements and activities.
Conclusion
Teaching temporal awareness means helping children understand the speed and rhythm of their actions and how time translates to specific moments. It's important to clearly explain time expectations so children can grasp concepts like fast and slow or short and long periods of time.
Once children develop basic temporal awareness, they can more easily predict events, such as catching a ball or anticipating when it’s time for dinner.
