Math Madness Wednesday: Telling Time

Happy Hump Day!  It's time for another Math Madness Wednesday with Krista from Teaching Momster!  This week's topic?  You guessed it...telling time!

I have quite the love/hate relationship with time.  It is such a difficult skill for many students, yet it is so necessary for life.  When thinking about life application of math skills, time is a pretty easy skill to create transfer goals for.

There are a lot of things that need to be understood in order for students to accurately tell time and understand how the clock works.

Student Need-to-Knows for Telling Time:
• Skip Counting by 5s and 10s and even 15 to move fluently around the analog clock.
• Skip counting on off decades. ie.  12, 22, 32, etc.
• Long hand vs. short hand on a clock (and why we have two different hands)
• Definition of elapsed time and the purpose of knowing how to calculate it (yes, I brought up elapsed time! UGH! I know!)
• How to read an analog clock.  With so many digital clock resources, students can become dependent on looking at a phone or a digital watch, but digital clocks still exist.

So, how do we practice telling time in a fun way?  A game of course!  After students have figured out how to discern the difference between a minute and hour hand and how to determine the minutes around the clock, they need practice, practice, practice.  Here are two games that will help students practice telling time to the hour and half hour and also to five minutes.

TIME to run!  I hope you all have a great day!