"What's Favourite"

"What's favourite?" my three-year-old asked.

We were out picking fruit at a neighbourhood orchard, and I'd asked her what her favourite fruit was. She just looked at me, confused. "What's favourite?"

This made me pause. It wasn’t an object I could point to with an explanation; it wasn’t something tangible. It was a concept - the idea that you could like one thing more than another. "I like feijoas more than kiwifruit", I told her, "but mango's my favourite."

Explaining that to a three-year-old, from scratch, was harder than I expected. It was the first time a question like that had stopped me in my tracks.

And I saw it from her point of view: how do you form an answer when you don’t even understand the question.

That's exactly what happens when we tell our three, four, five-year-olds "five minutes till we leave for pre-school." Kids under six can't process units of time, their brains just aren't there yet.

When we say, "five minutes", we're speaking a language they haven't learned. They're not ignoring us or dawdling on purpose. They don’t know what’s expected of them, or in what time frame.

They genuinely can't picture what five minutes means, same as my daughter couldn't picture favourite.

We already sense this. It's why we point to a clock and say "when the big hand hits the two." We're trying to make time visible, because we know the words alone don’t make sense.

But a clock is still confusing. It’s a symbol to decode, not something a child can just see happening.

What actually works is something they can watch, right in front of them. That’s what Little Sands does. It’s something tangible - it makes time visible.

I don't have to explain it anymore; she can just see it.