When children get to school they have lessons on clocks, but most of the lessons they receive make use of analog clocks. Most of the children have seen analog clocks, but they are not the predominant clocks in their environment. Most of the lessons children receive teach them about the analog clocks and how to translate times from the analog format to the digital format and back again. This contributes to the child's sense that time-telling is all very random and haphazard.
What must a child understand in order to understand analog clocks, digital clocks, and time-telling in general? First of all, the child needs to come to an understanding that people use clocks to keep track of the passage of time. This is not as simple as adults may assume. There is nothing inherently meaningful to a child about keeping track of time with a measuring device. This is something adults do. This is probably the most fundamental understanding the child needs to develop. Then, the child needs to begin to understand that the numbers that we use to measure time repeat themselves in a cycle: the times we say in the morning we say again at night. The child needs to discover that one set of numbers we use for time-telling only goes from one to twelve and then they start over again. But then, there are other numbers that we use along with the numbers one through twelve. These repeat also, but they repeat more often. These numbers also go through a cycle, but their cycle is 0 through 59 before it repeats. Teachers or other adults who are helping young children learn to tell time should make a point of showing them the two patterns that repeat: the zero through fifty-nine pattern first, because it repeats often, and the one through twelve pattern also, because it is important. The idea of patterns is vitally important here.
The tools that are the most helpful for teaching time-telling are clocks that allow a child to move time forward and back on his or her own. Analog or digital clocks with controls for the children to play with are excellent. This way, the child can move time ahead quickly and observe the change that occurs when a new hour occurs. The change from 8:59 to 9:00, for example, is important in helping the child see the relationship between minutes and hours. An analog clock where the hour hand moves automatically in response to the child's manipulation of the minute hand is perfect. That way the child can observe the movement of the hour hand as the minute hand goes quickly around the face of the clock. The child should be given tasks and questions that lead him to examine hourly changes in both digital and analog format. The analog clock that the child uses for this exploration should not only be movable by hand, but it should also have clearly marked, individual minutes. This way, when the minute hand moves past the top of the clock at the change of an hour, it is easy to point out the first minute mark. The teacher can help the child note that the digital readout 9:01 corresponds to the hour hand pointing at the 9 and the minute hand pointing at the first minute mark. Many such experiences need to occur, with the teacher guiding the child's manipulations of both kinds of clocks and pointing out the correspondence between the two.
The teacher also needs to specifically teach the appropriate language: "nine-oh-one," while it is not proper mathematically, is the way that we read the digital readout. We need to show children that this same time is sometimes read as "one minute past nine" on the analog clock. "Nine-fifteen" can be read as "quarter past nine" or even "fifteen minutes past nine" on an analog clock. "Nine-thirty" needs to be shown to be the same as "half past nine."
Further enhance your math curriculum with more Professional Development Resources for Teaching Measurement, Grades K-5.
