Kid's Math Talk: 3 Tips for Starting a Unit on Time

How well do your students really understand time?

Even after giving my students a pre-test on telling time and solving elapsed time word problems, I greatly misjudged their ability to tell time on an analog clock as well as to think about how long before the next hour.

After crashing and burning with several elapsed time number line lessons, I decided to rethink my approach and to consult the Common Core State Standards prerequisite understandings for time. From here I came up with three tips to help my students with their conceptual understand of the analog clock and telling time.

Tip #1: Make sure students know the hour time zones

Start your time unit with by giving students a common understanding of the "hour zones" on an analog clock. Use their schema about an "AB" pattern and divide the clock into 12 parts.

Tip #2: Give students resources to help them find the

minutes on the clock

Sometimes part of the trouble for telling time is knowing how to move CLOCKWISE on a clock and how to figure out where specific minutes on the clock are when given a problem.

Give students this page to use as a resource when working with time! The "clock facts" used for skip counting by fives even have a thicker border to help them stand out.

Tip #3: Practice, Practice, Practice!

Give random times and have students shade in the number of minutes on the clock. This will help them start to recognize the concept of moving clockwise as well as the total area a number of minutes takes on the clock.

Also, relating time to fractions of 60 minutes can help students estimate times while they are learning how to be very precise

Starting our unit over and focusing on these three tips has greatly improved the understanding of time in my classroom.

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