Learning to Tell the Time

D has been telling certain times for a while now; mostly when his bedtime is as he is keen to point out if he is early or late to bed!

We were given the opportunity to take a look at the resources produced by EasyRead Time Teacher. This is a resource that is aimed at schools to help with teaching children how to tell the time, but I was interested to see how it might help at home.

We were sent a Teacher board and a student board.  The teacher board is a large double sided board that you can write on and move the hands around on. One side of the clock shows the minutes past, and the other side the minutes too.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to use this with D if I’m honest so we just talked about the set up of the clock and when the big hand is on one side it’s minutes past, and the other is minutes to the hour. I then set some times up on the clock and D told me that times. I then passed him the smaller, student card, and asked him to make some times up; he told me the time he (thought) he had made and I replicated it on the larger one and we checked whether they matched or not.

I like the boards as they’re really clear to read and quite sturdy; the wipe clean feature is also pretty good as I can write a time in digital form on the board and get the children to replicate on the clock face.

We then followed up with some worksheets from Twinkl. D is really confident on the O’clocks and half pasts so he quickly rattled through that worksheet as he added the hands on to the clock faces to make the times. We then moved on to quarter past and quarter to the hour and he is getting a bit better at those times now.

I can see how the Easy Time Teacher could work in a school environment or a larger group environment but I’m not 100% sure how we will use it in our Home Education set up. There are a couple of other resources that Easy Read Time Teacher produce that I think might be better suited to the home and would be a nice accompaniment. The watches and wall clocks look to be really clear and easy to read and would be a consistent clock face for children to read from in the home and on their wrist.  I also really like the look of the snap games and I think they’d be perfect in a home education set up as I can see a couple of ways to use them in a 1-1 or smaller home setting.

I think we will perhaps work through some structured workbooks on telling the time in the coming months and I’ll leave the easy read time teacher boards out for the children to use in whatever way inspires them; they might surprise me!