Teaching Time to young students

Teaching Time
Time is a concept which is confusing to many children. Here I have tried to reduce the complexity by a story
Which relates to the
child’s day schedule.
If you tell this story
every day to your child,
she can understand the
 concept. The story is here.


An interactive version of the story is here in this link

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RTL6HOn1fFKw1Kd4FHg2fejYCzrLcN9nXRu89IQc560/edit?usp=drivesdk

How to make the child understand minutes, hours and days.

In this, I used numerous ways with my daughter. The one which worked was the

calendar. I made a chart with

The current month like this

But I put a grid to write the dates.Then I wrote all the weekdays in different colours.

 
Calendar concept 

Make your child mark the date , the month and the year in every activity you do. Soon they will be knowing how to refer the calendar and get these.

Now after these, introduce concepts like morning, afternoon, evening and night.

My daughter relates to it with an action she does in each of these times. She says I brush my teeth in the morning, I eat my lunch in the afternoon, I go for cycling in the evening and I eat dinner and go to sleep at night.

After all these concepts are done, then we have to do yesterday and tomorrow concepts.

I use the calendar chart again to relate the days with before and after numbers.

For example, I ask her what day is today?

If she is not able to find out, I tell her the date. She refers to the Calendar and says today is Tuesday. Then I ask what was yesterday? If she does not know, I relate it with before Tuesday and she will immediately reply it is Monday. 

Again ask what is Today. If she says Monday, tell, Oh oh yesterday was Monday. Now she understands and says it is Tuesday. Now ask what is tomorrow?

If she hesitates, I ask her what comes after Tuesday? Then answer comes.

How to tell time as hours.

For this, make a schedule for her activities throughout the day in one hour gaps.

Like the story I mentioned. Make the time story of your child for a day with pictures clicked on each hour.. Tell her the next day that at 7 in the morning, you were doing this, at 8 , you were doing this etc.Then slowly move to how much time she took for each activity. For example, she took 10 minutes for brushing, she took 30 minutes to eat her breakfast etc. Show her pictures of your clock at those times. Now ask her simple questions like what time is it when Adithi gets up? She will remember her picture and say 7 o clock. 


After working with the whole hours, show the child that there are four parts to the minute hand. Start with 30 minutes, make her see that when the minute hand is at 6, it is 30 minutes. 

Then try like the last slide, all the hours at 30 minutes.

Then 15 minutes, so the minute hand is at 3.

Then 45 minutes, when the minute hand is at 9.

Here , the child has to be familiar with 5 tables or skip count by 5.

So you can point to the real clock, take it near her and say that 1x5 = 5 , so when the minute hand is at 1, the time is 5 minutes from the hour. Do the same for all the digits and use the same hour. Like 10 am.

Then reverse the idea and ask if it is 10.15, where will the minute hand be?

I am giving some images here which you can use to play with your students to make the time concept easy to grasp.










  




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