What's the time, Mr Wolf? Learning to tell the time is tricky! Here's how you can help.

4 o’clock, 5 o’clock… dinnertime!

Do you remember playing What’s the time, Mr Wolf? in the playground? Do you remember the challenge of learning to tell the time? I don’t recall learning to read the clock but I definitely remember the challenge (and sometimes pain!) with my own children.

Will had a keen interest in the time when he was in year one (and I happened to be his school teacher at the time!) but he did NOT want to know anything about the analogue clock.  He could tell me how many minutes it was to the next hour from the digital clock, but if I asked him to read the time from the analogue clock, no chance, now way, nope!

Fern was a little more willing with the analogue clock but found it really hard, and still does.  It is hard!

What does the national curriculum say about learning to tell the time?

The national curriculum includes learning about time, but with so much to fit in, it’s really difficult to find time to teach time effectively to all children… there just isn’t time!

In the Early Years Foundation Stage (up to age 5), time is gently introduced and children explore past and present (Understanding the World), and pattens, sequences and routines, quantities and the everyday language of time (like ‘before, after, later’) in Mathematics.

In Key Stage 1 (ages 5-7), time is taught through routines but also gains a specific focus in maths lessons. Children learn about sequencing, using the language of time, the days of the week and months of the year, telling the time to the hour and half hour (year 1) and then to five minute intervals (year 2), and solving problems involving time.

In Key Stage 2 (ages 8-11), children are taught to read, write and convert the time between analogue and digital clocks, read the time in minutes (12 and 24 hour clocks) and use am and pm accurately. They solve deeper problems with time and learn the number of seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour etc, and number of days in each month.

There’s a lot to learn here, especially when there might only be a week or so each term put aside for learning time in maths lessons.  Children need to learn and overlearn the time, so it’s important to revisit it more regularly, including out of school, for them to understand what they need to know.  By age 11, we could be expecting them to catch a school bus on time, and get from lesson to lesson in school, so a day-to-day understanding of time is essential, if we can help to develop this.

What can we do to help?

From very little, singing a days of the week song can help, and you might find a months of the year song (that you can tolerate on repeat!) on YouTube. This only helps initially with learning the song and not what it means, but the order of the days will be secure for later, when conceptual understanding develops further.

Talk about time. Narrating your day is really important in supporting language development and understanding, and including the vocabulary associated with time helps your child to learn to use it for themselves, when they are ready to:

Days of the week: It’s Monday today so we are going swimming. We go swimming on Mondays…

Months of the year: Your birthday is in May. Daddy’s birthday is in April…

Time in hours first: 12 o’clock – it’s lunchtime! Bedtime is at 7 o’clock…

Time in half hours: At half past 9, we will set off to the station…

Invest in a teaching clock like this one: https://amzn.to/42lDLLr or with 24 hour clock times, too, like this one: https://amzn.to/4cPr1jS . Pop it up on the wall in your child’s bedroom or in the kitchen, and refer to it regularly, just pointing out the time.

When your child is ready, start with asking them to identify the time in whole hours. When they’ve mastered those, move to half hours, noting that the short hand is half way past the hour (something I didn’t pick up on when creating worksheets as a student teacher – oops!).

Next, move to quarter past and then quarter to – it’s the times ‘to’ the hour that become tricky. One half of the clock = past, and the other half = to the next number. The next step is reading the time in 5 minute intervals and lastly, individual minutes.

Collect leaflets and timetables and look at how timings are presented. A swimming pool timetable can often look a bit complicated, and opening hours to different places can also provide a talking point.

Games like What’s the time Mr Wolf? From Orchard Toys can be helpful if played a few times: https://amzn.to/3ExtoLo . Orchard Toys had another great game using times in the day like lunchtime and doing the dusting (!!!) but I can’t find a link to that one. Maybe people don’t like dusting, after all (like me!).

There are lots of workbooks available on Amazon and in book shops to help with reading and writing the time, if you like that sort of thing! Try here: https://amzn.to/3Y8KK80 .

Children often like a ‘worksheet’ approach as they see the beginning and end of the task. Practical experience, with the actual clock, is somewhat more valuable, but I recently came across a really good book to complete drills to learn to tell the time: https://amzn.to/4jho7Xk .

Finally, screens get a lot of bad press but there are lots of free online games that can help, like this one from Maths Frame: Telling the Time and a useful online clock from Top Marks, where you will also find lots of games.

It's really difficult to fit in learning activities at home, especially when we are working and running around to lots of different activities in the evenings and at weekends, but if we can make talking about the time part of our routines, this can only help in the long run. 

If you have any concerns about how your child is beginning to understand time, you could talk to their teacher who will be able to provide more ideas.  Parent consultations are also available from RM SEND. https://rachmackay.wixsite.com/rmsend

Please follow on Facebook: RM SEND: Family SENCo, Bespoke Tutoring and Family Learning Blog.

*Contains Amazon Affiliate links to help support this blog.