Saturday 16 January 2016

Numeracy - Telling Time


One of the Numeracy topics this year for William is being able to tell the time.
This is a difficult activity to learn and only up to a couple of years ago it wasn’t taught fully until the second half of primary in Key Stage 2.
Recent changes however have meant that it is being taught earlier.
It is expected then that:



Year 1 (ages 5-6): Pupils should be taught to:

Tell the time to the hour and half past the hour and draw the hands on a clock face to show these times.

Year 2 (ages 6-7):  Pupils should be taught to:

Tell and write the time to five minutes, including quarter past/to the hour and draw the hands on a clock face to show these times.
Know the number of minutes in an hour and the number of hours in a day.

Year 3 (ages 7-8):  Pupils should be taught to:

Tell and write the time from an analogue clock, including using Roman numerals from I to XII, and 12-hour and 24-hour clocks.
Estimate and read time with increasing accuracy to the nearest minute; record and compare time in terms of seconds, minutes and hours; use vocabulary such as o’clock, a.m./p.m., morning, afternoon, noon and midnight.

Year 4 (ages 8-9):  Pupils should be taught to:

Read, write and convert time between analogue and digital 12- and 24-hour clocks.
We have been trying over the last few weeks to incorporate time in just general terms such as Morning, Lunchtime, Dinner time, Evening and Bedtime.
Initially we were talking about activities that happen at certain times of day e.g. “we eat breakfast in the morning” and “we go to bed at night time”.
We then moved on to discussing when certain things happen; ideally this starts off the concept of blocking time into sections. Such things like, Literacy, Numeracy, Topics, Library and reading time.



As you can see there is just a clear order of what our activities are for the day. As each activity passes we cross it out and move on to the next one.
This is just reinforcing that there is a time structure to the day.
Following that we started adding time references to the order.
For Example:
7.30 am Breakfast
8.00 am Cleaning teeth
8.15 am Getting Dressed
8.30 am Literacy
And so on…..

Although at this stage actually reading the time isn’t completely necessary it does show a time stamp to the activities that are being done.
After spending some time with this and knowing that the Boys fully understood the order we moved on to the next part of the topic, which I will write about in the next post. 
Have you started teaching time with your children? How did you do it? Would love to know!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We used our daily timetable too. I stuck post its around the clock showing key times.
My boys also enjoyed playing with stopwatches a lot. They timed themselves running around, building Lego, and this helped familiarise them with time. It can entertain children on car journies too. They can guess how long it will take to reach a particular landmark, then time it and see how close they were.

Bear and Cardigan said...

It's not an easy thing to teach. When my son was little digital displays were new and everywhere. All watches were digital too. The only analogue watch I could find had a Mickey Mouse hand, so he had one of those. I think it was advertised as a teach your child the time watch (not cheap either!) We also bought an analogue clock for the living room. I love the idea in the comments of using a stopwatch, it really does give them the idea of time, and fun too.

Unknown said...

Time is so important in our lives but it is really hard to teach (mostly the minute hand). Our three year old has interest in learning but is nowhere near learning how to count by 5's and cannot understand the basis of 60 mins/hour. We normally use time in ways like "when the big hand gets to the top its time for ..." our main clock in our house has Roman numerals so that's pretty much shooting us in the foot. Thanks for outlining the school requirements as per age!
Tori
www.themamanurse.com

tanya said...

we're all learning to tell the time here. We play clock solitaire, talk about how many minutes are in a hour, half, quarter etc. I set times on when we will do something and ask them to let me know when that time arrives. We're very informal.