Nursery World - Book extract: Alison Clark's Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child

There are many ways to think about time, says Alison Clark in this edited extract of her book Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child

‘Afternoons were extended times painting at the beach, learning about the birds’

There may be many reasons why young children can find their time in early childhood education and care divided into shorter and shorter fragments of play. This was one of the contrasts Mary Jane Drummond noticed in her reflections (2000) on reading the detailed accounts by Susan Isaacs about Malting House school: ‘In comparison with the primary classrooms where I have taught in the past and regularly observe today, there was no time wasted in the business of forming into lines, waiting in lines, completing the registers, collecting lunch money, searching for PE equipment – all the events that add up to evaporated time. All the available time was available for the children, not for the teachers’ routines; it was filled with the children’s dramatic, vivid lives.’

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