Daytime

#day#sun#daytime#bright#sky

For a child who cannot yet read a clock, daytime is a fairly blurry idea. The pictures below give a concrete anchor for how things look when the sun is up and the day is in its bright stretch.

Sunshine

A smiling sun with rays peeking behind a blue cloud above green hills.

Sunny day

A sunny day scene with a smiling sun, a white cloud and green bushes.

About this visual support

How do you explain daytime to someone who cannot yet read a clock? The word on its own means little, but a picture of a bright sky and the sun up high gives a child something to pin their sense of time to.

Once the day has its own image, it becomes easier to place the rest of the twenty-four hours in relation to it. A child sees the difference between the waking of morning, the bright middle of the day and the dark of evening, and starts to sense that time moves in an order. One idea is to set the daytime picture next to a night or evening one, so the contrast between light and dark makes the concept clear without you adding more words.

Try to use the same daytime picture each time you talk about what will happen today, so the link between the word, the light and the feeling grows on its own. If you want to gather the day into a sequence of images, you can build it in the Routined app, which you can try at no cost for fourteen days.