YOUNG LEARNERS. How to teach the time to children.(Including printable worksheets and PowerPoint slides)

 

Telling time can be difficult, especially for kids. But as a parent or teacher, you can make learning how to tell time a fun activity by introducing it through a variety of fun activities.

That being said, there are a few critical ages when kids should be able to learn about the concept and mathematical process that relates to time. Here’s a look into the incremental process in which children should be able to tell time — and be receptive to its teaching:

3 to 5 years old: Children learn that time exists and that everything takes time or occurs at certain times, but, how time functions is generally a complete mystery. For those children who attend kindergarten, or who are taught at home, it is this period when they can learn the basic concept of what a clock is and how it functions as a way to measure time.

5-6 years old: Children should be able to read the hour and half-hour markers on an analog clock. Additionally, they should be able to draw the corresponding times.

6-7 years old: Children should know the number of minutes in an hour as well as hours in a day. They should be able to tell and draw time in five-minute increments.

7-8 years old: Children should be able to read an analog clock and be comfortable using time-specific vocabulary, such as o’clock, a.m./p.m., and general times of day (morning, afternoon, noon, night, and midnight).

Below is a selection of tips for how to teach young children to firstly understand the concept of time, and secondly how to tell it. These tips are adaptable for both the classroom and the home.

Teach the mathematics of time.

Practice Counting to 60: Before they can run, they have to walk. Similarly, before they can tell time, they have to know all their numbers up until 60, comfortably. Help them learn by having them read the numbers from a chart, write them, and recite them from memory.
Practice Counting by Fives: Once your child has learned to count to 60, teach them to count to 60 by fives. Your child will have mastered this when they can recite and write from 0-60, from memory. 

Teach them the general concept of time. 

The general concepts of time are morning, noon, evening, and nighttime. Familiarize your children/students with these concepts by associating each concept with certain activities. Then quiz your kid by asking them when certain things happen.

For example, “In the morning we eat breakfast and brush our teeth. At noon, is our lunch break. At night, we eat our dinner, read a book and go to bed.”

You can ask them, “What happens in the morning?” and “What happens at night?”

You can create a poster and put it on their bedroom/classroom wall so that they have something visual that shows them the different things that they do throughout the day. This will allow parents/teachers to refer to the poster when explaining the times of various daily events.

Place an Analog Clock in a Prominent Location

The best way to learn a language is through immersion, and when you think about it, time is kind of like its own simple language. Pick up an old-fashioned analog clock or two and place them in visible locations in your house/ classroom, such as above the living room TV / computer. This will help the children to not only get used to seeing time in analog format but to see it as a physical thing that constantly changes.

Make a Paper Plate Clock

Time for some hands-on fun! Buy a couple of paper plates — one for you and one for your children/students. Spend some time creating paper clocks together. Start by labeling the hour numbers, then trace your hour and minute hands on a decorative piece of paper. Punch a hole through the middle of the plate and through the bottom of each hand, and then use some sort of fastener to hold it all together. Now, you can use these paper clocks to quiz them on the time.

Move those hands

As an alternative to a paper plate clock, draw a simple clock face on a piece of paper or cardboard, then get your children/students to use two colors of plasticine/playdough to make a shorter hour hand and a longer minute hand. Talk about the events of the day—for example, “At 7 o’clock in the morning we get up, at 8:30 you get to school”—while moving the hands to the right spot. “This helps children/students to start associating activities with the actual passage of time.”

Roll of the dice

Get a dice, and together with the clock face that you made in the previous activity, roll the dice and move the hands forward or backward the corresponding number of hours. To make this game a little more entertaining, maybe you could add a different activity to go with each time such as 5 o’clock is time to play! etc.

Secret identity

Having your children/students understand that the “2” on the clock face actually means “10 minutes past….” is one of the more challenging things for them to learn. One fun way to explain this is to tell them that numbers have secret identities. Kids have incredible imaginations, so anything you can do to create a cool narrative is going to help them relate to the concept,”

Mountains, Hills and Rocks

Grasping the concept of the amount of time between time A and time B, known as “elapsed time,” is another toughie as any parent or teacher trying to get kids to school in the morning understands. Here’s one way to explain it. Write a beginning time, like 7:30, on the left-hand side of a paper, and an end time, like 9:02 on the right-hand side. Then, show how to break down the time into units: one hour from 7:30 to 8:30 is a mountain (draw a peak to represent an hour), 8:30 to 9:00 is a hill (draw a curve to represent 30 minutes) and 9:00 to 9:02 are rocks (draw two smaller curves to represent each minute). Add them up to show how much time has passed. This game works because kids like storytelling and visuals, and the size of the curve relates to the size of the unit of time.

Discuss the Time at Significant Periods Throughout the Day

Use an analog clock to your advantage throughout the day by talking about the time that specific things happen. For example, your children/students might know that their morning snack time is 9.00 am or that their bedtime is 8:30 pm. At these specific times, ask them what number the little hand is pointing to. If they’re ready to go further, then ask them about the big hand. They’re learning by relating important times of the day to the numbers on the clock.

Point Out How Much Time Certain Activities Take

It is important that your children/students learn about the concept of time, and that everything takes a certain amount of time to happen. In a similar way to the previous tip, inform them of how long each daily activities take. For example, you could tell them that brushing their teeth takes two minutes, that their English class takes 45 minutes, that their morning recess period takes 20 minutes etc. Or perhaps if you have an appointment, and you have to leave in a half-hour. Let your child know you have 30 minutes until you have to go and ask them what time it’ll be when it’s time to leave.

Avoid Figurative Expressions

The old expression “I’ll be there in a minute” is easy for us to understand, but nothing’s more confusing to a child than using time terms such as this. When you are teaching them how to tell the time, and the concept of how long everything takes, then expressions such as these create confusion because they go against what you have taught them. For this reason, it is best to avoid saying “in a minute” or “in a second” until they have a basic understanding of time.

I hope that this article and these ideas were able to help you to teach time to your children/students.

Good luck and good teaching.

(The following printables and PowerPoint slides are not created by the author of this article, but were obtained from the internet)