Since prehistory, humans have found ways to tell the time. Whether studying the position of the sun in the sky, using a sundial, or glancing at a modern smartwatch, we need to know the time to help us organise our day.
Telling the time is an important skill, otherwise how will we know when it is time for dinner, or time to catch a train?
Teach your children about time using our handy topic guide!
Teaching Ideas
- Give children times to convert into different formats (words, analogue, digital). Use this worksheet (or this one) to record their answers.
- Use word problems for children to work on their problem solving and time skills all in one go.
- Use this fun idea for children to check if their lessons start and finish on time.
- Use this teaching clock to demonstrate adding and subtracting units of time from 1 hour to 1 minute, on a clock face and a digital readout.
- Visit the NRICH site for lots of time based investigations.
- This fantastic blog has lots of ideas to use, including using lego and making a human clock!
Resources
- Our What Time is it? sheets are perfect for practice and revision.
- Use this excel sheet to check that children can covert from digital to analogue.
- This handy reference sheet is useful to support children when converting time from analogue to digital and vice versa.
- Our Stopwatch Tool is handy for use on an interactive whiteboard.
Time Facts
- There are 24 hours in a day. Each hour is 60 minutes long. Each minute is 60 seconds long. That means that there are 86,400 minutes in a day (24 x 60 x 60)!
- Water clocks were used in Ancient Egypt to tell the time.
- The largest clock faces in the world can be found on the Makkah Royal Clock Tower in Mecca. Each of the four faces is 43 meters (141 feet) across and can be read from 17 kilometres (10 miles) away!
- Every four years an extra day is added to February. This is known as a leap year and occurs because the earth actually takes 365 and a quarter days to orbit the sun.
- Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist, discovered that pendulums could be used to measure time at the beginning of the 17th century.
Videos
Time
A simple song about the times we do things during the school day.
Running time: 2:15
Time Trouble
Can the Numberjacks stop Spooky Spoon messing around with time?
Running time: 14:04
A brief history of time telling
This great video from the British Museum is a summary of the history of telling the time.
Running time: 5:55
Number lines for elapsed time
This video demonstrates how to use a number line to solve elapsed time problems.
Running time: 3:24
Books
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
The Bad-tempered Ladybird
Clocks and More Clocks
A Wrinkle in Time
Lift-the-Flap Telling the Time
How Do You Know What Time It Is?
Get Set Go: Mathematics Telling the Time
Links
- Visit the Maths Frame Telling the Time page for a fun game to practise reading the time, or the Find the Start Time game for word problems on elapsed time. A word problems game can also be found on the site.
- Match the clock face to the written time in this Hickory Dickory Dock game.
- Help Adventure Man answer questions about the order of the months of the year.
- This simple game is good for learning the order of the days of the week.
- Compete against the computer or other players to match analogue and digital clocks in Giraffe Dash.
Are you teaching your children about other topics? Explore our full collection of guides!
