Great Tips on Teaching Children How to Tell Time

Learning to tell the time can be quite a difficult task for youngsters. 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’s certainly not too much of a leap to say that we just can’t function properly in society unless we develop a good grasp of this skill! As a mom, this can easily become just another issue to concern yourself with, or it can be made into an exciting adventure of some sort for our kids, and perhaps we can even have a bit of fun with it ourselves too.

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 designed with the young child in mind, to encourage interaction and interest as they learn to tell the time. Try to place the clock in a prominent place amidst the nursery decoration, and refer to it often.

Invest some time each day for several weeks at this task and you should quickly find that you cannot help but succeed. You really should be somewhat regimented about this, as most learning usually comes from repetition.

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.

Show the child what happens when you move the long hand around in a complete circle and the short hand moving to the next number. Have your child do this action themselves as well, and then practice it with them for a short time. Do this, and this alone for several days till you feel that your child has really got the grasp of it before moving on to something else. 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 absolutely loves being a mom; decorating nurseries and offering valuable advice on baby nursery decoration. Since you’ll be spending most of your time in the nursery - for quite a while, it’s crucial to make it safe, cozy and really welcoming. You can look over her extraordinary selection of beautiful items for your baby right now!

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