Victoria--Any suggestions for teaching time?

Sorry for the delay in answering — travel, work, and so on.

This is a heck of a good question. I honestly do not have too many direct answers to this one — a few later — although I sure know what does *not* work.

Personal experience: I have a weird constellation of symptoms which match a lot of what now is called NLD — although they also predict failure in math and I happen to have six years of university math … One of these symptoms is that I always had an extremely weak sense of time. I honestly did not know if ten minutes or an hour had gone by. I got around elementary and junior high school by following my class (no sense of time, poor sense of direction, and zero organizational skills — but boy, I invent good coping skills.) I never wore a watch until my thirties because it didn’t connect to my thinking and I never remembered to check it. I also never used calendars and figured out if it was a schoolday or not by remembering if my students and coworkers had been celebrating Friday. After I passed age thirty, something “clicked” in my brain, Heaven knows what, and I developed the time sense of a schoolchild — at least started being able to make appointments and more or less keep them. In my failed marriage, I started watching TV for the first time in my life, and half-hour sitcoms started to give me more of a sense of a certain time passage; now at fifty, I actually have some sense of elapsed time. None of this applied to my ability to read clocks or to add base sixty, which I can do just great as a mental system, just don’t ask me to be anywhere at that time.

My daughter is very bright in a number of ways, and since she took to reading like a duck to water, or more like a wolf to red meat (Give me book! I can read myself!) I tried to introduce her to math early. The effort failed miserably. She is perhaps above average in math, but not brilliant. She did OK on arithmetic (although a personality conflict with her third-grade teacher left a large hole in her multiplication tables) and well on algebra and then had a rotten calculus teacher whose deficiencies she couldn’t make up by herself. To this day, age 18 and third year university, she *still* cannot read analog clocks. If forced to, she can stare at a clock for a minute or two and come up with a time, but it is more than a foreign language to her (she speaks those well); to her, clocks are from another planet. Her coping skill is that since Grade 3 she has always worn a digital watch day and night.

When she was five I bought a really nice clock with colour codes on each ten minutes and cute hands like crayons and an instruction booklet. She completely ignored it. I still keep it in the kitchen because it’s bright and readable — OK, I admit I have kindergarten time sense.

Having myself and my daughter as examples, and having taught Grade 1 and 2 and remedial math, I can tell you what does *not* work:

Forget trying to teach telling time to kids in Grades 1 and 2. The vast majority are simply not ready for it. The idea of objective time in the reality outside oneself just does not compute until a kid has gotten well into the stage that Piaget calls “concrete operational”, most commonly at about age 7 1/2 to 8, or Grade 3. Yes, you do meet the occasional exceptional kid who can tell time and do logic puzzles at age 6 (my ex-husband for one) but they are the rare less than 1% of the population. The rest are looking at you as if you’re from Mars. Yes, you can make up all sorts of worksheets and drill for months and get the kids to do the work — and two weeks after you end the unit, if you ask them to tell time it’s as if you are speaking Martian again. They won’t retain it, because they have no other concepts to attach it to. And if you drill hard enough with a kid like my daughter, they will shut down and refuse to ever learn.

Be very cautious of workbooks and drill sheets. I have found these useful on occasion; sometimes I use them as individual work at the student’s own speed, sometimes work through the book personally with a tutoring student, using it as a lesson guide; sometimes assign work for review. But as often used as a class teaching tool, giving two groups “seatwork” while the third group is actually being taught something, I find them worse than useless. And kids who have been exposed to workbooks used like that will have developed bad attitudes and work habits.
Workbooks are often sold commercially, and there is no check at all on whether the contents are factually correct or pedagogically sound.
So if you use a workbook, first check a couple of random pages and try to follow the directions yourself and see if they make sense and if it’s readable, then look at the table of contents and see if it’s organized progressivel;y, not just a collection of unrelated trivia, and then use it *with* the student, discussing purpose and meaning as you go, and filling in any gaps.

An old-fashioned method which comes and goes in fashion in teaching and which is historically correct: did you know that for the first century or so, clocks only had one hand? The early clocks from Gaklileo’s time only showed the hour. You estimated half past, quarter to, etc., by the position of the hour hand.

By the way, side note: “Big hand” and “little hand” are VERY confusing, and often inaccurate as the hour hand is often shorter but much fatter. Please don’t use this terminology! ***Much better way***: teach the kid to distinguish “short hand” from “long hand”. (In some mis-learning cases, this may be the root of the problem.)

Make up a model clock with poster board (nice and large!! At least a foot across, so you can really see small changes), an hour hand cut out of cardboard, and one of those brass flexible clips called a paper fastener as a pivot for the hand. Measure and mark the numbers very carefully — uneven positioning will make this more confusing. Letter the numbers very clearly as well, nice calligraphy or stencilled (large) or rub-down or computer numbers — just make sure they can be read at a good distance from the wall.

Now teach the student to put the hour hand on exactly five o’clock, halfway after five towards six so it’s half-past five, and so on. Then give him hour-hand times of halves and quarters and have him read them off.

OK, at this point, he has a useful skill. And it makes sense. Tell him to ignore the long hand (the minute hand) for the moment, at least on real clocks. Caution — workbook clock diagrams may not show proper hour hand motion. On a good schoolroom clock, he should be able to estimate the quarter-hours just from the hour hand, unless he’s in the far end of the room.

*Use* this skill by making appointments with him, such as “I’ll be at school to pick you up after soccer at a quarter to five — check your watch and be waiting.”

I would tend to leave this skill alone for a while to become automatic and fixed in the mind before adding on something new.

After a few months, *then* you can start to teach the relation between the minute hand and the hour hand. I would tend to start with sixty minutes to an hour and calculating how many minutes in half an hour, three-quarters, two and a half, etc. Then half-hours on the clock and the idea that half-past six is also six-thirty. Then the hard one, that quarter-to eight is the same as three-quarters after seven, or 7:45 (I’d take some time working on this, and I’d do a lot of circles with 3/4 shaded in from 12:00 to 12:45, etc).

Elapsed time, the time from 1:45 to 5:15 or (worse) from 10:15 AM to 2:00 PM or (worse yet) from 10 AM Tuesday to 3PM Friday, is a very difficult skill and will take time and work. **A very large number of entering college students fail this kind of question**. It’s a really important skill if you want to get your pay correctly, but it’s not simple. Time lines/number lines are useful, but don’t push it if it’s too much of a battle — there are other things to spend six months on. When he has something important in his life, like the start and end of the soccer game, or his first after-school job, then this will matter to him and he’ll be motivated to deal with it.

Do email and tell me how it’s going.

Victoria

I teach time to LD children. I find it is the directionality confusion which causes many of the problems. I have the children each make their own large clock. We watercolor it yellow like the sun. The sun is our first clock! Then I guide them to putting in the numbers 1-12 in the correct places. we make them blue. Next on small red cardboard “rays” we write in red the numbers 5, 10, 15, ….60 and we glue the rays behind the clock numbers- like the rays of the sun.

Then we make the hands and label them: a shorter blue hand- The Hour Hand and a longer red hand- The Minute Hand.
We add the hands with a paper fasterner and are ready to practice telling time. I only allow them to move the hands clockwise- very important! I begin with 2:00 for example and guide them through the 5 minutes past until it is 3:00. We practice this in order going from me giving them the time- they make it - to me showing the time on my clock- they tell me the time. We learn how to say it and write it different ways- 3:15, 15 minutes past 3, This part requires lots of practice and I stay with it until they get it.
Later I introduce half past, quarter past and quarter to. They need to understand fractions for this. We draw 3 clocks and shade in half past, quarter past and quarter to so it is concrete. Again this requires a lot of practice to identify the time and do the opposite show the time and write it.
The last piece I do is how many minutes until the next hour.

I use a demonstration clock with gears so they can see the movemnt of both hands- A Judi Clock available from educational catalogs.
One year we made a human clock by drawing a clock and labeling it out on the playground around a lamppost. Then we used 2 colred ropes- red for minute hand and blue for hour hand- The kids held the hands and jumped around the clock to tell time- only going clockwise!

My 9y/o dau also has difficulty with telling time, although other forms of math are easy for her. We purchased a timex “time teacher” watch for her, and it has been quite helpful. The minute and hour hands are different colors. The hour numbers match the hour hand, the minute hand matches the minute numbers, which are around the outside of the dial. It’s pretty easy to read, and is reasonably priced ($15-20). We’re hoping that by using it on a daily basis (which she does — she loves being able to tell us the time!), she will slowly develop the concepts and won’t need the “crutch” of the extra numbers on the dial.