Telling Time
Lessons in this chapter
About Telling Time
Tick Tock builds time in the order kids actually meet it: first the sequence of a day, then the calendar, then the clock.
Order Daily Events comes first because the idea of before and after has to exist before a clock can mean anything. Putting breakfast, school and bedtime in order is time without numbers, and it is where the vocabulary gets attached.
Order Days and Months adds the cycles. Seven days that repeat and twelve months that repeat are a child's first encounter with a sequence that returns to its start, which is a genuinely different kind of pattern from the ones in the patterns chapter.
Tell Time to an Hour and Half an Hour then reads the clock face. Two hands moving at different speeds around a dial numbered 1 to 12, where the minute hand pointing at 6 means thirty, is one of the least intuitive notations kids meet, which is why 1st grade stops at the half hour.
Three lessons, each opening as a worksheet in the page. Order Daily Events and Order Days and Months come before any clock face appears, and Tell Time to an Hour and Half an Hour is the telling time worksheet most children need to repeat a few times. All three are free and scored as you go.
Frequently asked questions
Three lessons, in the order children meet time. Order Daily Events puts before and after into words, Order Days and Months adds the repeating cycles of the week and the year, and Tell Time to an Hour and Half an Hour reads the clock face. Telling time to the hour and half hour is a first grade Common Core standard in Measurement and Data (1.MD); ordering events and naming the months is groundwork the standards do not list separately.
Reading a clock to the hour and the half hour, plus ordering daily events and knowing the days of the week and months of the year in order.
Because the notation is genuinely awkward. Two hands move at different speeds on a dial numbered 1 to 12, and the minute hand pointing at 6 means thirty, not six.
Because before and after have to mean something first. A child who can order their day has the idea of sequence that the clock then measures.
Focus on the hour hand. At half past, it sits between two numbers, and the one it has passed is the hour. Kids who read only the minute hand say “half past six” when it is half past five.
Analogue, which is what this chapter uses. Digital is easier to read but shows nothing about how time passes, whereas a moving hand makes the passage visible.