http://linds.net/time.html

Marion Blackmore first came up with the concept.

I don’t remember having difficulty with time, but I do remember being excited by the concepts of other days in relation to today. “Today is the yesterday of tomorrow!” I would exclaim proudly, to my mother’s delight, and then, “Today is the tomorrow of yesterday!”

Science illustrations can sometimes penetrate where words cannot. Time may be visualised as a spiral. Take an extra-long white shoelace and wrap it around a consistent-width cylinder, such as a smooth-sided water bottle. Make sure it touches, but does not overlap. Color one “side” of the spiral with a black marker and leave the other white. When you unwrap it, you have a series of days and nights.

However, I do get what you all mean by finding other methods.

For example, Cameron’s been counting down the “sleeps” until his birthday. He knows when it’s day time, and night time and that his sleeps divide the days. So in 3 sleeps, he turns 5.

Since writing this and talking to people, I’ve encountered many people who’ve never really thought about the concept of time being foreign to people with Autism. I wonder why it’s not discussed more.

Perhaps this is a big part of what helped Einstein? Maybe once he grasped the concept of time in his own way, he was able to understand it to a greater degree than most people… just a thought.

I love Blue Night’s suggestions because Audrey is every into the moon’s phases, etc….but she may still be a little young to put it all together.

As to Cameron: since people like me are logically intuitive, but incapable of understanding the physical world except through the lens of science, you may have to build his sense of time from the very basics, matching concepts to concrete mental pictures:

Start with a day. A day is a measurement of the Earth’s rotation, as described by the sun’s relative position in the sky. Noon is when the sun is directly “above” us, and midnight is the exact opposite. The sundial is a tool that was invented to track the time of day using shadow. (At this point, build a sundial with him, and have him mark the shadow on the ground or with chalk at noon and other hours during the day.)

Months were originally based on the phases of the moon. Weeks are marked by the moon’s quarter phase changes; it takes four weeks from full moon to full moon.

As for seconds, choose a place for him to run to and back, and time him.

Emphasize at some point that what he is seeing are measurements of time, and not time itself. Time is like a river; you can measure its depth, but the water that is here now is not the water that was here before. (Being at an actual river may help.)

Tammy