Taking Time To Understand Time
Taking Time To Understand Time
Taking Time To Understand Time
248
The Investigation
Learning goals, rationale,
pedagogical context
Telling time is often taught as a rote skill, without
ensuring that children understand the duration of
time and its relation to the numbers and hands on
a clock (Thompson and Van de Walle 1981). This
investigation provides opportunities for children
to investigate time units, experience events lasting
set amounts of time, and develop personal referents
for standard time units. The typical approaches to
teaching time do not highlight the differences associated with the two hands of an analog clock. The
hour hand simply points to the hour, but the minute
hand must be understood in terms of the distance it
has moved around the clock from the numeral 12.
For this reason, this investigation has students work
with two types of one-handed clocks to meaningfully discover both differences and connections
between the two clock hands. The sixteen students
in the investigation were in a diverse second-grade
class at the Samuel S. Gaines Academy in Ft.
Pierce, Florida.
Copyright 2008 The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Inc. www.nctm.org. All rights reserved.
This material may not be copied or distributed electronically or in any other format without written permission from NCTM.
Lesson 4
1. Each student or pair of students will need a clock
with moveable hands that maintain the correct
relationships as they are moved.
2. The teacher will need
a slit clock;
a clock without numbers;
a transitional clock; and
a regular clock.
Previous knowledge
The students in this investigation could tell time to
the nearest hour, and many of them could tell time
to the nearest half hour. They had little or no formal
experiences with fraction representations, and they
had just completed a unit on money.
Lesson 1
The purpose of the first lesson is for students to
develop personal benchmarks for one-second and
Teaching Children Mathematics / November 2008
249
250
Figure 1
Students predicted how many times they could repeat an activity in one minute.
(a) S
ome predicted similar
numbers for all activities.
(b) S
ome made unreasonable
predictions.
(c) S
ome stopped when they
reached their prediction, even
before the minute was up.
Figure 2
Students worked with one-handed clocks
called slit clocks.
(a)
Lesson 2
(b)
Photographs by Ivan McMillen; all rights reserved
251
Number lines made of Unifix cubes helped clarify minutes and hours on a clock
as students counted by ones and by fives.
Lesson 3
This activity parallels that of Lesson 2, but the
class investigates clocks with only a minute hand.
The lesson emphasizes connecting groups of five
to minutes on the clock face and using efficient
counting strategies to tell time. To begin, give each
student five connected Unifix cubes and point to
children as you go around the room. Have them
chant, counting by fives with you.
Then give each student a cutout of five connected Unifix cubes and repeat the counting by
fives. Next, have a student tape his cutout cubes
to the board. It works best to align the cubes horizontally even though this takes more board space.
Draw a vertical line segment at the right end of the
cubes. Ask the class how many groups of five cubes
are on the board and write the 1 beneath the line
segment. Then ask the class how many cubes are on
the board and write the 5 above the line segment.
Continue in this manner, having students add their
cubes to the horizontal number line one at a time.
Have the students report both the number of groups
of five cubes and the total number of cubes. Some
students may notice that the number of groups is
the same as the number of students who have put
up their cubes.
Once the number line is complete (see fig. 3a),
have the class discuss the two sets of numbers and
how they are connected. To start the discussion, we
asked questions such as, How many groups of five
cubes make thirty-five cubes? We also pointed to
a specific cube (such as the twenty-third cube) and
had the class count up to that cube. Some students
counted by fives as long as they could and then by
ones, but others counted only by ones.
Teaching Children Mathematics / November 2008
Figure 4
A clock without numbers shows twelve
minutes after the hour.
Figure 3
253
Figure 5
Examples of student work from activity
sheet 2
(a) J
orge drew a hand to represent sixty
minutes past the hour.
(b) M
ost of the second graders were comfortable working with numberless clocks, but
some wrote numbers to count minutes.
Lesson 4
Todays activity begins by asking students to
investigate the motion and location of the minute
hand as it relates to the hour hand. As the children
investigated, we continued to refer to the clock
hands as the long hand and the short hand until it
was time to connect the ideas and practice telling
time. We started by asking students to use their
individual clock (with hands that maintain the correct relationship), point the shorter hand directly
at a number, and then share where the longer hand
points. You may want to make a table showing
the number for each hand and the resulting time
(see table1). Students should conclude that when
the shorter hand points directly at a number, the
longer hand points to the twelve and the resulting
time is a time on the hour (an oclock). Similarly,
ask students to place the shorter hand halfway
between two numbers and ask where the longer
hand is pointing. In this instance, students should
conclude that the longer hand will point to the six
(or thirty) and the resulting times are times on the
half hour (the thirties).
Table 1
Sample Chart of Clock Hands and
Corresponding Times
254
The shorter
hand is
pointing
directly at
The longer
hand is
pointing at
The time is
12
1:00
12
5:00
12
8:00
12
3:00
Reflections
The activities from this investigation can also be
used to address times with minutes before the hour.
We deliberately omitted the phrases quarter past
and quarter of and referred to such times only as
fifteen minutes past and fifteen minutes of. The students had just finished a money unit that explained
a quarter as 25 cents, and we anticipated that they
would struggle with a quarter of an hour being fifteen minutes rather than twenty-five minutes. Students have not yet had experiences with different
representations of fractions, so we did not attempt
to reconcile fifteen minutes with one quarter of a
clock face but will return to this concept after we
introduce fractions. Similarly, if a class is only telling time to five-minute intervals, all of the activities
in this investigation are easily adapted. It is not
necessary to wait until the class is ready to tell time
to the nearest minute.
This investigation is designed to provide students with a working understanding of time units
and their connections to the hands of a clock. It provides opportunities for students to incorporate time
concepts into their personal experience. As suggested by Principles and Standards, the activities
emphasize the development of concepts of time
and the ways it is measured, rather than learning
just to tell time (NCTM 2000, p. 104).
Bibliography
Friederwitzer, Fredda J., and Barbara Berman. The Language of Time. Teaching Children Mathematics 6
(December 1999): 25459.
Horak, Virginia M., and Willis J. Horak. Teaching Time
with Slit Clocks. Arithmetic Teacher 30 (January
1983): 812.
Krustchinsky, Rick, and Nancy Larner. Its about Time.
Teaching Exceptional Children 20 (Spring 1988):
4041.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).
Principles and Standards for School Mathematics.
Reston, VA: NCTM, 2000.
Thompson, Charles S., and John Van de Walle. A SingleHanded Approach to Telling Time. Arithmetic Teacher 28 (April 1981): 49. s
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10 minutes
2 minutes
2. It takes me
my chair.
4 minutes
3. It takes
4. It takes
55 minutes
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Mathematics
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TEACHING CHILDREN
Mathematics