Teacher opinions about teaching conventional time concepts to 1-3 grade primary school students

Concept of time covers an important role in the lives of children regardingto the development of traits such as planning and organization of their experiences,awareness of responsibility and adapting themselves to life. Therefore, it is anecessity for children to learn these concepts especially at the beginning of schoollife.Conventional time is an organized presentation of time concept. In otherwords, conventional time is a system of symbols and a cultural production used by agroup of people to indicate circles and orders related to time (Friedman, 1978).Conventional time is a structure and order organizing our seconds, minutes, hours,days, weeks, months, years and seasons.The aim of this study is to determine teacher opinions about teachingconventional time concepts to 1-3 grade primary school students and i) determineteacher opinions teaching conventional time concepts in terms of sex ii) examineopinions of teachers having different length of service iii) determine opinions ofteachers having different professional backgrounds.In this study, descriptive analysis technique was used. The source of thestudy was composed of all primary schools (N=137) of Haymana (N=15) andKeçiören (N=17) districts of Ankara in 2005-2006 educational years. All the primaryschool teachers (N=103) working in determined schools (N=32) took part in thisstudy as participants. Teachers were given a questionnaire consisting of open-endedquestions. Besides, 9 of these teachers were interviewed by the researcher.As a result, teachers were expressed that have difficulty teaching hours andmonths, communication with parent and social life effect to learn these concepts andneed to consider features as readiness. findings reached in the frame of literature andteacher opinions were evaluated and suggestions were made concerning teachingconventional time concepts.Keywords: Conventional Time Concepts, Teacher Opinions, Teaching TimeConcepts, Concept, Learning Concept, Cognitive Development