Telling Time

Do you remember what age you knew how to tell time? I definitely don’t, but I do see it being taught in school from Kindergarten through second grade. I agree that those are definitely some pivotal childhood years where having a sense of time is important.

Time is math, and without a strong math background, time doesn’t mean anything other than “am I done yet?”. I want to teach you two things in this blog; first, is how to teach your child enough math to understand an analogue clock, and second, how to tell time.

Analogue clocks. Do we even use them or need them anymore? It’s a little like the cursive argument, I would say. Sure, we can get along in our daily lives without the knowledge of either, but it would be better if we knew both. Maybe we should call it a privilege to be able to read cursive and tell time. Most cursive items of the past have been translated into print for all to read, but it would be a privilege to see the Declaration of Independence in person and be able to understand the writing of our Founding Fathers. We can check the time on our phones 1,000 times per day, but it would be a privilege to be without any device and hear the chimes and read the time on Big Ben.

There have been calls to stop teaching cursive and stop teaching time lessons because we don’t need it anymore and because it’s too hard, but these are becoming lost languages of the past, and we need to preserve them. We shouldn't stop teaching something because it’s too hard, should we? Instead what we need is another way to help kids understand. Again, maybe that’s a problem for our schools. How can we teach a class of 10, 20, or even 30 students and expect them all to have the same knowledge at the end of the day? We can’t. So do we really stop teaching? That can’t be the right answer. Check out this article on why these schools are doing away with analogue clocks and are turning to digital only. Do you agree that it’s too hard to tell the time during tests when looking at a clock? It might be, but if we taught telling time better and more thoroughly, then it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

Step 1: Learn math. There are so many concepts one needs to know before they should even look at a clock. If you skip these, you’re skipping the underlying understanding of telling time and you’re setting yourself up for a life of digital clocks. What do we need to know for time? We need to know all forms of time. The easiest form of time to learn is what’s simplest, and that is the four seasons. Let’s not talk about minutes and seconds and hours in a day because let’s be honest, your child probably doesn’t understand the difference between the words and definitely doesn’t have the body awareness of the difference of 1 minute versus 10. That’s how all parents get away with leaving the playground or the pool. We might say 5 minutes, but maybe it’s 1 minute, or maybe it’s 10 because we got caught up talking to a friend. Measuring small quantities is really tough, so let’s measure the biggest things first.

There are four seasons. Winter, spring, summer, and fall. It’s cold, it’s rainy, it’s hot, and it’s cooling off. There are some great books about seasons, and one of the simplest that we love is this one from the Berenstain Bears. From this, we can understand that time changes and it makes BIG changes in our world. It’s also important to tell this as a circular story. Time always comes back, it repeats, and this concept will make telling time on a clock face easier. From here we love to make charts of the seasons. With four huge pieces of poster board or any big paper, we can write the months that correspond to each season. Here are some great examples of charts you can make. We love to expand this into art projects, geography lessons (where the weather changes, why it doesn’t in some places, what weather change looks like - snow to rain to run, even what people wear), and even language lessons. You can write words in on your charts, draw them, or make lessons from this lesson. Anything extra will add to the understanding of time.

Once your child understands seasons, it’s time to talk about months. Notice how we start with big ideas and make them smaller. This works for almost every lesson. Make it easy to understand! Months - depending on your child, you can teach them the names of the months, or just have them understand the concept of months. They’re grouped into seasons. There are 12 of them. They have about 30 days each. If your child wants to know more, great, but it’s rote memorization at this point and less important that they know the names of them as much as they understand where they fit into seasons. If you’re up for it, at this point we suggest getting or making a monthly calendar. Here you can mark birthdays, holidays, activities, and more. It’s important to have little post-it’s or an equivalent to mark “today” “tomorrow” and “yesterday”. My favorite form of calendar looks like this but has those three phrases like this. I definitely would steer away from calendars with multiple parts. You want your child to see one calendar - one month that shows the different days. When calendars start having different parts or different boxes talking about the days and the weather, it becomes hard to read and overstimulating. Keep it simple - don’t use something like this calendar. Show one month with as many details that fit inside that month as possible. Hopefully as you see the differences in what monthly calendars look like, you can see the difference in one chart with 30 days - as detailed as you want, versus 5 charts with all different details spread out all over the wall. One calendar. One time. You can even make these at home yourself and with your kids!

Homemade calendar

The next big lesson is about what a day is. Now is a good time to tell them that as the season changes and the months change, time is changing. We can measure time by seasons if we want, we can measure time by the sun, or we can use clocks, but before we really teach clocks, we have to understand what one day is. This is an awesome question to ask your child: What is a day? The most common answer you’ll get is something about waking up and going to sleep or the sun is awake in the day and the moon is out at night. And those are perfect answers. It’s great to talk about all of the different ways we can measure a day. When we go to school or work, come home, how we time our meals, when bath time is -all of these ideas represent time in a day. Now you can tell your child you can actually measure the time in a day.

A day is 24 hours. !2 of the hours happen when the sun is shining and 12 happen when the moon is out. When we look at a clock, the big numbers go from 12 to 1 to 2 and so on, back to 12. 12 isn’t the most important time, but it’s an easy time to remember for two reasons: it’s lunch time and it’s the middle of the night. That’s why it’s on the top. From there, we can watch the hand on the clock go around slowly, and every time it goes all the way around, it’s been 1 hour.

A good assessment of 1 hour is about how long an activity is for your child. Soccer practice or gymnastics, or whatever it might be (even if it’s only 30 minutes) gives them a great concept of time. They know how long an activity is because it’s the exact same every time. Call any activity that they do 1 hour.

This is the best time to look at a clock or a watch. This watch is our FAVORITE. As you can see, it has numbers for the hours, but not for the minutes. Take some time, days or weeks, and get your child adjusted to looking at this. Tell them they can ignore everything except the short hand and the numbers. Once they can read where the short hand is, you’ll teach them more. This idea of getting to learn more as a reward will be one of the best tools you can ever, ever, ever use for your child. Ever.

How do you teach the hours when the short hand is in between numbers? The simple way is to say if it’s not right on a number, read the smaller number. (We do assume at this point your child must be able to count to 12 and know that 1 is smaller than 2 and so on.) It’s not the best in terms of overall comprehension, but it’ll get the idea out quickly. Obviously this doesn’t work when the hand is between 12 and 1, but it’s going to be way easier to teach a small exception than explaining clockwise and counterclockwise and above and below. We don’t recommend going out and buying books on telling time or all different clocks to read, but if you want to make a paper plate clock with one brad and some cut out arrows, go for it! Use your paper plate and your child’s watch as your guides to reading hours.

Now comes the tricky part. Introducing minutes. There are so many ways you can do this, but the first thing your child HAS to know is how to count by 5’s. They should also know estimation at his point. And rounding. I’m not going to say they HAVE to know estimation, but the more you know, the bigger and the easier the concept, the better telling time will be. Hopefully they’ve already learned this, but if not a quick song about 5’s should do the trick to get started. Once 5’s are ingrained, you can teach minutes. Tell your child that every hour has 60 minutes, and while we can count every minute, we prefer to count by 5’s. It’s ok to say lunch is at ABOUT 11:45, because if we say lunch is at 11:38, people will probably show up at 11:30 or 11:45 anyway. Time is not perfect, and we don’t have to be perfect reading a clock, just about right.

We spend a lot of time counting our 5’s going around the clock. We don’t add in minute numbers to the side because we find kids forget which number to read first and with what hand. Use your finger and show how we say “zero” or “o’clock” at the top, and count by 5’s as we go around. Keep going and going and going. Your child doesn’t have to have it memorized and it’s ok if they count by 5’s to get to 40 every time you point to the 8, you just want them to understand how to count on a clock.

Once they can do this, add in a minute hand on your paper plate. Tell them that because there are SO many minutes to count, the hand has to be longer. You need a way for your child to differentiate the hands, and usually that does the trick.

The last step is reminding your child to read small hand number first, and then the big hand. And that’s time!

Remember this is a process. Time isn’t taught in a day, and it’s definitely not taught on a watch. Time is a concept. It’s a measurement of the world around us and how we see it so make sure your child sees time before they read time.