My 10-year-old son, who I home school, is having a very hard time learning to tell time. He does fine on digital clock of course, but just can’t seem to get the concept on a standard clock. We have done tons of worksheets, worked with a teaching clock from discovery toys, and a read book about time that came with a clock with 2 different colored hands and he still cant get it. He has to count by 5 to get the minutes and can’t understand language like twenty-five to the hour or quarter past. My son is very bright and severely dyslexic. Today he asked almost in tears ” mom can I just use a digital clock”? Until today I have insisted he knows how to tell time but maybe it’s just not worth it. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Re: telling time
To this day there are some things I cannot do. I cannot add or subtract in my head. I can’t remember colors.
We all have our ‘glitches’. That this issue is reducing your son to tears would be a sign to me that now is not the time for him to tell time. Digital clocks abound and there will be plenty of time for him to try again later.
Re: telling time
You might want to consider a cognitive training program — either PACE (http://www.learninginfo.com) or Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com). They tend to help dyslexics a lot with tasks like this.
I had given up teaching my daughter how to tell time, because it was clearly hopeless. However, after she did PACE, she was able to learn it in a normal amount of time.
PACE is expensive, but Audiblox is only about $80 for video, book, and set of starter manipulatives. Both do a lot to develop skills that don’t come naturally to dyslexics.
Mary
Re: telling time
My friend’s LD daughter, who now is a freshman in college, couldn’t tell tell conventionally until high school. She now wears a watch without the numbers on it and has no problems with it. I learned this when I expressed my frustration with teaching my 8 year old LD son to tell time. She thought it just took a lot of time for it to stick. She went over it many times. So I too would lay off and return to it later. (My own son told me that it was unnecessary and that he could wear a digital watch.)
Beth
Re: telling time
Thank you everyone for the feedback! All of your replies helped so much. It’s great to be able to communicate with others who have dealt with this and get your input! We will put the clocks away for awhile and try the one handed clock later, after the stress passes. Thanks again!
Victoria is dead-on right--Thank you, Robin G.
I can attest the one hand method really works. I’ve been meaning to write a post on this mainly to thank Robin G. who recommened it in a post here a number of months ago. There is a book called One Hand at a Time (available through Amazon or Barnes & Noble) that gives you a lot of sequential, hands-on, activities to do to teach telling time…one hand at a time, starting with the hour hand. It is aimed at elementary school teachers, but works just as well at home.
My 11 year old could not tell time on an analog clock at all (unless the hour was directly on the o’clock). Due to overwhelming homework, I waited until winter break to get him going on the One Hand activities. I spent at least an hour and a half a day (broken into two sessions) for seven days going through the activities. He now tells time perfectly!!…Not fast, he hesitates a bit, but perfectly. He can even tell me how many minutes it is before the hour. (The book has activities on the before/after stuff.)
I did not do every activity in the book (some were too childish) and cheated on the clock making…I used a teaching clock after unscrewing one hand, and for some of the activities I used up to three teaching clocks.
I can’t thank Robin enough for suggesting this book. By learning to tell time, his sense of time has improved greatly and he understands a lot more the necessity of getting home work started and done early. It has been a tremendous help. This book has demonstrated to me how important the way something is taught is to having the child learn it. If only his school had used the methods in this book in second or third grade….
Re: telling time
I took the minute hand off the clock we use in the kitchen an Nathan gets it right 90% of the time! He is much less stressed now. Thanks again for the help!
Re: telling time
Sounds like you’ve got it solved and i’m going to look into this book, but when I started teaching my son last Sept he couldn’t count to ten and clocks were alien. Yet one morning just to try to relax him I tried Roman Numerals. I didn’t know how much he’d picked up until that afternoon we were shopping in a nearby town and I worried about a store closing by 5pm. He said don’t worry-it’s only 4:00. I didn’t really pay attention to what he was saying-maybe even said somthing like this is serious-stop kidding. He pointed at the town clock and I realized it was Roman numerals nad he’d got it right. He still can’t tell time though his math skills have improved except on a Roman numeral clock. (And I remember being TOTALLY baffled by that big hand little hand thing. )
Well, my darling daughter, who is not dyslexic although she shares my directionality and tracking problems, never did learn to use an analog clock and to this day (age 19) insists on digital. Of course this was exacerbated by a particularly obnoxious Grade 3 teacher who wanted cookie-cutter kids in her class, the fact that since age five she will never ask me for help, and the fact that she is stubborn as a small mule.
She can get away with it because she is bright and competent in many other fields and she is cute, so it’s just a sweet eccentricity.
I would really encourage you to try to get him to learn clocks as this is a general social expectation and the fewere things you have to cope with, the better.
However, I *would* put away the workbooks and sample clocks and all the rest of the stuff for a while, six months to a year. Let him have a mental and physical rest and time to drop the frustration. Then when you come back to it tell him you think you tried too much too fast and that he should now be old enough (ie take the blame yourself)
One issue before you start: the “big hand” and “little hand” terminology that is standard is often just wrong and is incredibly confusing. The hour hand is shorter BUT fatter, and the minute hand is longer BUT thinner, and if you actually calculated the areas, the hour hand is the same or even bigger. So which is the “big hand”?? I use the terms “long hand” and “short hand” which are accurate and meaningful, and results have been good (except with darling daughter, who left the room)
One thing I suggested as a possibility, and I’ve since seen other people recommend: historically, clocks started out with only one hand, the hour hand. Make a sample clock with only an hour hand. Buy a really cheap large-faced battery-powered clock and remove the minute hand and then hang the one-handed clock on the wall.. Then teach him to tell the hours, then half past, then a quarter past, then a quarter to, using *just* the hour hand. Then teach him to spot which is the hour hand (the short one) on any clock and to do the same. This makes sense, is non-distracting, and is an immediately useful skill.
There’s nothing wrong with counting the minutes by fives; let him do it until he either remembers the points on his own, or does it so fast he might as well have memorized.
The “time to” is the hardest, and can wait a good while. He probably won’t need to use anything but “quarter to” until at least Grade 6 or so, maybe later. You can try to teach the quarter after - quarter to (and compare to half past - which by the way, Germans call half to the next hour, so you see …) by using a circle of yellow paper with the quarter and half cut out of red and glued on. Add an arrow, large and dark, showing the direction of motion of the hands. If he gets it, good, and if not, it can wait.