Can you remember how you learned to tell the time? No, me neither, and yet it is quite a complex skill and not easy to teach. Time keeping is important for functioning well in society and especially in school. It is also an important element of science. Most people just dive right into the technicalities of how a clock works and children often struggle to get what it is all about. Those with a numbers orientation respond well to digital clock types while those with a more conceptual mind may like the analogue representation of a clock better. However, one thing that all children benefit from when learning is context.
Thus a good place to start is to explain what our time keeping system is based on. Our concept of time is based on two physical factors: the duration of one complete rotation of Earth’s spin relative to the Sun (1 day) and the duration of a complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun (1 year). If children have already had some exposure to the concept of our solar system they will understand easily these aspects of how the Earth moves. Indeed many quite young children are fascinated by the concept of the solar system and love to name all the planets and moons so relating telling the time to this interesting topic will be beneficial both to stimulate a desire to learn and to provide valuable learning context.
Once the idea that a 24 hour day is connected to the rotation of the Earth is established, the the concept of splitting the day up into hours is more readily accepted by children. Then comes the nuance of the 2 X 12 hour operation of an analogue clock. This requires some explanation of the concept of the equator, where there is roughly 12 hours of day and 12 of night all the time and opposed to the concept of seasons in the northerly and southerly latitudes. Establishing this context and the idea of seasons is valuable learning in and of itself but also provides much needed context for why our system of time manifests with two 12 hour cycles.
When this context is achieved, we can get on with the technicalities of how both analogue and digital clocks operate. Here a little historic information on how people used to tell the time before clocks might be fun, and remember fun is an aid to learning. Children will find it amusing to think that in the past people had to use sundials, hour candles and hour glasses to record the passing of hours and couldn't record minutes and seconds at all. Then we can explain how one uses clocks to tell the time by taking the children on a journey from hours in the day to minutes in the hour to seconds in the minute and putting it all together. But it isn’t enough to just know the technicalities, we must also teach kids the language of telling the time so that they can understand the various ways people can tell them what time it is and therefore how they can also use the correct terms
to tell someone else the time. This includes the nuance of variation of language between the British English and American English conventions and also the digital clock method. You can introduce the concept of the 24 hour clock later but better to let the basic 12 hour system sink in first. And as always it is important to keep reinforcing the learning with examples and practice aids.
So we can see that telling the time is a complex topic that requires contextual understanding, technical operations and language knowledge to master. We hope our video on the topic is useful, together with our related videos on seasons and space.
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