Learning to tell the Time...

How did you learn to tell the time? Can you still remember?

Here is the central idea and lines of inquiry of our current mathematics unit:

Many teachers and parents teach their children the time using an analogue clock face with two hands but an analogue clock face has too many dials, too many hands and seems to offer too much information. The secret to this is to break up the learning into smaller chunks, which is what we did in grade 1.

First we learned about clockwise movement, then we learned how the hour hand works on its own. We learned how you can tell the time with only the hour hand! This stage takes a lot of practice and you can't move on to two hands if you are not confident to tell the time with the hour hand on its own.

Then we learned how useful an extra hand is to tell us the time more accurately so we can know how many minutes past the hour it is.

We were now ready to make our own clocks!

The clocks that we made have some special features. The hours and hour hand are shown in red. Can you spot them?

The minute hand and minutes are shown in blue. Can you spot them?

It was a big surprise for some of the students to find out that the minutes are actually on the outside of the clock and that people who can tell the time have to imagine the digits because they are not actually shown!!!!!!

Now we are ready to learn to tell the time with two clock hands and if you come to our learning celebration next week, you will see how we are getting along with that!