In Touch with the Seasons

My daughter Manon is at that great age of almost five, and time and how it passes is of great interest to her. She wants to know that she's going to be seven "soon." How do I describe the two year gap? She quotes the time as "thirty o'clock" and wants to know why this is so funny? In order to help her understand time and how it changes I have started a nature table area in our home and a calendar with a batch of white stickers from staples that we can write on to mark special days, and how they were spent so that a few days later I can point to three days past and say....remember three days ago when we went to the park and ate marsh-mellows? The literal exercise of counting it out is helping her understand. Now her cousin is coming for her fifth birthday and I am trying to show her the distance between today and friday when her beloved cousin arrives. A nature table is something I was introduced to in my Waldorf School in Detroit. It was a small table draped with colorful silks that reflected the colors of the season, and held trasures that could be touches and explored. Our summer table had a bright yellow silk to represent the sun and had vials of sand, starfish, pebbles from the stream, fresh flowers, leaves and sticks...and every time we went on an outing we were on the lookout for something from nature to bring back to our table. The kids loved to bring guests to see it and could talk about the day it was found, and what the weather was like that day, and how the discovery came to be. I'm just about to start our autumn table which is my favorate, and I'm looking for the leaves to start changing so that I can replace our summer days with fall.