How to Teach Your Kids to Tell the Time

It can be tricky to teach children how to tell time. Some adults don’t even know how to do it quickly! But there are ways you can teach your kids how to tell time without causing them any stress and it can even be super fun!

Here are a few fun activities that will help your kids understand the art of telling time.

1. Use Easter Eggs

Easter eggs and telling time? How strange! But it works.

Get yourself some of those plastic Easter eggs and a permanent marker.

Then, write matching times on the half and top half of each of the Easter eggs.

Use different formats for this; analog/digital and text.

One of the best things about this game is that children will be able to understand there are different ways to talk about time.

Once the eggs are ready, place them in a circle around your child. Label your childs’ arms big hand and little hand and have them point to different numbers guiding them to the correct time.

2. Move the Hands of the Clock

For this game, you need to draw a clock face on paper and then have your children make two clock hands out of play dough; a short and a long one.

Go through the events of the day for this game and have your child move the clock hands to the right time.

For example, they get up at 7 am, go to school at 8:30 am, and so on.

Go through their entire daily routine with them because it’s familiar and have them move the clock hands as you go along.

3. Mountains, Hills, and Rocks

Elapsed time refers to the amount of time that stands between time A and time B.

This is also a bit difficult for children to grasp and it can even be difficult for parents to explain.

However, this game can help!

Take a piece of paper and start with a beginning time, such as 8:30. Write that down on the left side of the paper, and then write an ending time on the right side of the paper.

Then, show your children how to break down the time into units.

For example:

7:00 to 8:00 can be a mountain, and you can draw a peak to represent an hour.

8: 30 to 9:00 can be a hill, and you can draw a small curve to represent half an hour. Lastly, 9:00 to 9:01 can be rocks, each rock representing a minute.

All there’s left to do is add them up, and they’ll know how much time has passed from time A to time B.

In this case, the visuals help make things a bit easier, but it will take practice!

Just remember, make it fun and praise your kids each time they get it right.

4. There’s an App for That

Apps can also be useful and fun when it comes to teaching children how to tell time.

You have Time Teacher on iOS and Telling Time on iOS and Android.

These apps will help you practice with your kids very easily!

5. Puzzle Time

iKids stock bright and colourful wooden clock puzzle that can be a great tool to assist children in learning about the time.