23 Years of Teaching Time The Wrong Way!

Teaching Time...teacher and kid's nightmare! Groans from Mairead and Alf when I said this was coming up! But found a couple of great articles.

One of which informed us that we had been teaching time the wrong way, and when we all read it we agreed that it made a lot of sense.

http://ainsleelabs.com/avoid-the-biggest-mistake-teachers-make-when-teaching-time/

So instead of talking about where the hour hand is pointing to, we describe it as what room the hour hand is in. The class have really got behind this and I think it has helped in stopping making those common errors for times such as 2:50, 4:55 etc.

Also a great idea for looking at minutes came from http://maccss.ncdpi.wikispaces.net/file/view/Taking+Time+to+Understand+Time.pdf 
which I found on the following blog: http://www.teachingspecialthinkers.com/2013/01/telling-time-is-easy-peasy.html


Again, using the manipulatives of unifix cubes, having the children count in 5s and visual tools has really helped them in their understanding of the concept of hours and minutes. We have also only looked at minutes past the hour as this seems more logically when moving on to digital and 24 hour clocks the following week.