Learning to Tell the Time
The gift of a brilliant Mini Kyomo kids watch for Christmas brought with it the urgent desire to be able to tell the time. We jumped to it - minute hand, hour hand, read the numbers they point to - pretty straight forward right? Well yes, and no. We missed some basics, like how long is a minute? And How can there be two 8 o'clocks in one day?
Free guide for learning to tell the time
We have since put together a step-by-step guide on learning to tell the time with an analog clock. This is a much more thorough (and relaxed) way to learn about the time. You can download our guide at the bottom of this post. But first, here is a little about what it covers.
Make your own practice clock
We start off by making our own clock. With this we talk about what makes up a clock face and are able to develop our clock as we move through the guide. There is a printable clock face in the guide but designing your own clock might be more fun.
Seconds, minutes and hours
Next we talk about what we could do in each amount of time. There are "Recap!" pages in the guide with exercises to help reinforce new concepts. In our experience there were some pretty unrealistic expectations for what could be done in an hour, but a long bath sounded good!
Morning, afternoon and evening
Throughout the guide there are questions and suggestions to help encourage conversations about time - like different times of the day and what we would be doing in our day-to-day routine.
O'clock
We explain the position of the minute hand and write the hours on our homemade clock, then practice telling the time at different o'clock positions.
We invented the game "Charades O'clock" where we had to guess the hour from what was being acted out. Super fun!
Past / To the hour
The guide covers both the simpler way of telling the time, by saying the hour and then the minutes, as well as telling the time using the past/to the hour method.
We also include important time telling terminology like noon and midnight and practice scenarios for a.m. and p.m.
Learning to tell the time
Our best advice for learning to tell the time is to make it fun and enjoy the time together (no pun intended!). Get crafty by making a clock face that you can use to practice the different concepts and talk about the time during your day-to-day routine as much as possible.
Downloadable guide to telling the time
We hope you find our guide useful and that you have fun learning to tell the time. Use the guide in an order that makes sense to you. Explain things in your own words, the sillier the better in our experience ;) After looking through the pages you will be able to judge which information is relevant depending on your child’s level and time journey so far.
We’d love to hear about your progress and see your homemade clocks. If you’d like to share them with us on Instagram you can tag us @antipoda_co. Or let us know how you get on in the comments below!
Download our free guide here (2MB PDF)
This is a free guide for personal use. If you wish to share the guide feel free to do so by using the link to this blog post, thanks!
