Time awareness in reading comprehension

During the lessons I often see that children in group 7 still lack some basic concepts. Time awareness in reading comprehension is one of them. What does it mean and what can you easily teach your child yourself?

The months of the year

Not all children know all months of the year. This is annoying for your cito test because there are questions that assume you know the months. In what order these months are. And that every month has a number. They don’t ask that, but sometimes a child has to be able to calculate a length of time in months.

Example could be. The first lambs were born 5 months after “Sinterklaas”. The question may then be: In which month are the most lambs born? Often there are options. So you can guess, but such a question is easy to solve by a child if he or she knows the months of the year.

Events like Christmas throughout the year

Just like a child should know that Sinterklaas falls on December 5, a child will also need to know when, for example, Christmas falls, which day is New Year’s Eve. Which day is New Year’s Day. The concepts of summer vacation and autumn vacation also appear in the stories. So it’s easy for a child to know when what happens during a calendar year.

The 4 seasons

The 4 seasons and which date belong to them, is a basis for a sense of time during reading. Besides the fact that we mean the same with spring as spring, we also expect a child to know that this starts on March 21. And that every season lasts 3 months. This makes it easier for a child to calculate with months during reading comprehension.

Less important but funny exercises for cohesive understanding

Some children are good at math and enjoy it. You can then practice at home with the weeks or the days. For example, you ask: how many days are there in a week? How many days are there in a year? So how many weeks are there in a year? How many months are there in a year? Approximately how many weeks are there in a month? How many weeks do you have left per year? How many months are there in a quarter? How long does a season last?

It’s more like a math game. And your child will gain a better understanding of the coherence. You can extend this for the advanced by adding up a number of weeks of vacation, or for the real math geniuses among us you switch to hours / minutes and seconds.

Put events of the story in the correct order

In many texts there is a question where you have to put certain sentences in the right order. A Story cannot be written chronologically. For example, a writer starts with here and now in the first paragraph. In the next paragraph he describes what happened before that. And the paragraph after that jumps to another point in time.

Not writing chronologically makes a story more fun to read. But sometimes kids have a problem with that. They just don’t understand what the “put in order” question means.