HOW TO TEACH CHILDREN TO TELL TIME

How to teach young children to tell time. Teaching ideas and printable resources to help you teach the concept of time and how to tell time in class.

Time is a tricky concept and telling time can be something many children take years to understand and do accurately. 

Teaching time to young children can be difficult as it's such an abstract concept in many ways. Hands on play, games, visual supports and lots and lots of practice can help children understand how to tell time and the concept.

This post contains affiliate links.

TIME AS A CONCEPT

To effectively teach young children how to tell time you need to first look at the concept of time.

What is time? How does time pass? How do we record this passing of time?

There are so much vocabulary that can be related to the concept of time - seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, decades, centuries, morning, afternoon, night, sunrise, sunset, today, tomorrow, yesterday, last week, next week. There are many tools we use like clocks, watches, timetables, calendars and diaries to keep track of time.

Timelines are one of the best tools to introduces children to when first talking about time as you can create a visual to help illustrate the passing of time.

In class, we started by talking about what we have already done that morning - woke up, had breakfast, got dressed, brushed our teeth and hair, packed our school bags and travelled to school. 

I had the children quickly draw five things they did yesterday and then in pairs, their partner had to try and put them back in the correct order.

We also talked about what we still were to do today using our visual timetable as support. 

In our next maths lesson, we created our own classroom timeline recording the times each event happened. The children each drew a picture to match the time.

Don't they look amazing displayed across our classroom wall! 

My students are familiar with the idea of a timeline as I have a term timeline displayed year round which I add photos and descriptions of our activities every week to. 

It's been a fantastic way to communicate with families and the children have been able to see how far they've come. You can spot it under our school day timeline.

TELLING TIME 

We have also been practicing telling time.

We've looked a lot at clocks - we've built clocks with our number rocks. We've made simple clocks from paper plates. We made paper watches to wear home. We've drawn clocks.

When teaching time, one of the first concepts I introduce is the idea that you can use just the hour hand on an analogue clock to tell the time.

Many children take a long time to grasp that when the minute hand moves so does the hour hand. Often when making half hour times, children will point the hour hand at the number rather than half way between. 

So I will only get give them the hour hand to use on their clock faces. We introduce and then practice this as a whole class at the start of our lesson a bit like mental math. As a follow up, we've done activities like the one picture below in our math groups to practice further. The posters help visually support their understanding.

Once they have become more confident in knowing where the hour hand would be for hour times and then half hour times, we re-introduce the minute hand and work on positioning both.

We've been using our blank clock face cards for our Mental Maths routine to practice telling time to the hour and then half hour on our analogue and digital clock faces.

I highly recommend Teaching Time's Whole Class Clock for your IWB and their Stop the Clock game too. My class has loved trying to beat their times while matching the clock faces.

We've also been playing with clocks in our maths centres. 

We've been using clip cards clock cards to match analogue and digitally displayed times, played memory games with both clocks and used our 12 sided dice to roll and build a clock to match the time before writing it on our clock face cards.

We've been matching puzzle pieces and using our Make The Time Mats to practice making the correct time.

We've also been sorting activities we might do in the morning v those done in the PM. 

This activity has unexpectedly turned into a great conversation prompt as the children compare the activities they do to those of their classmate and when they do them. 

Puzzlingly, we learnt some children brush their teeth before breakfast...

Once my class became a little more confident, I also introduced these playdough mats and time cards to our math centres. The children choose a time to make using the mat and their playdough then flip the card over to check their clock is correct. 

It's been a great way to build some independence into our centres and for the children to review what they know.

We've used these mats with our time cards but the more confident time tellers have been using a 12-sided dice to randomly make the time. It's been a handy center for fast finishers.

Why not grab some of our hands-on math resources for your classroom?