How to Teach Your Kids How to Tell The Time

Learning how to tell time can be fairly difficult for most kids. It’s definitely one of the most essential skills that they can learn early on, as just about everything which we do as people seems to relate to the time of day in some way or another. It is not too much of a stretch to say that we cannot function unless we get a solid grasp on this task! As a mother, this can become just another thing to worry about or we can turn it into an adventure of some kind for our children and have some fun with it ourselves at the same time.

There are many products designed specifically for children and you can buy some very visually stimulating clocks to hang on the wall of a room. These baby accessories are made just for young kids, to encourage their curiosity and their interaction as they discover how to tell time. If you can, mount the clock in a easy to see spot amidst the nursery decoration, and talk about it regularly.

Spend a little bit of time every day for some weeks at this particular job and you should find that you will be successful. You do need to be a little bit regimented, as most of learning is in the repetition, of course.

First thing that you should do is to explain the hands – that the short hand relates to hours and the long hand relates to minutes. Explain that each time the long hand goes around the face completely this represents the passage of one hour. When this minute hand goes full-circle, the other hand will move to the next number.

Point out to the child what occurs when you slide the long hand around in a full circle and the short hand moves to the following number. Have your child physically do this and practice this for a while. Before going on to something new, it’s best if you just stick to this activity for a few days until you think that your child has a good grasp of it. Try and make this a fun activity – for example, the clock may have cartoon characters next to each number and you can use these characters to underline your story. Strive to find ways of making this a really fun activity – for instance, the clock might have cartoon characters along side each number, and you can easily use these characters as a basis for your stories.

As you move on, you can teach them about half hours, five minute intervals and then move on to seconds. Please don’t try and be too technical about all this and think that you should get into the deep definitions of time itself, as most likely we cannot explain this adequately to ourselves!

You might also want to incorporate some games into the process. Gather some children together and stand them in a circle and get one of them to tell the others to move into a position to represent a certain time as it would appear on the clock. You can get a large sheet of paper and draw a circle. Get the little ones to draw a particular time on the clock using cutouts for the long hand and the short hand.

You will be surprised that, right around the time they begin to graduate from their nursery bedding, they will start to pick it up pretty quickly and will soon have mastered one of our key fundamentals.

Bethany Bien really loves being a mother, decorating nurseries and sharing advice and ideas on baby nursery decoration with mom’s everywhere. Since you’ll likely be spending quite a bit of time in the new nursery, it’s worth while to ensure that it’s secure, comfortable and pleasantly decorated. You can peruse her complete selection of essential items for your baby at your convenience!