How to Tell Time with Teaching Aids

A simple clock teaching aid can be made using a paper plate.

Teaching students how to tell time is a basic, but crucial, lesson for elementary school students. Although teaching a child to tell time may be difficult at first, once you lay the foundation by teaching the basic concepts of time and the minute and hour hands, students often pick up on the concept fairly quickly. A simple teaching aid can be developed using affordable, everyday classroom materials. By having children create their own teaching aids, they will be more apt to retain the concepts behind telling time.

Things You'll Need

• Paper plate
• Hole punch
• Brad
• Construction paper
• Markers
• Scissors

Instructions

1. Cut out two arrows from construction paper. Make the body of one arrow, the minute-hand arrow, longer than the other, the hour-hand arrow. Use a whole punch to punch a whole in the identical locations at the base of each arrow. The base is the side opposite of the arrow's triangular section.

2. Punch a hole in the center of your paper plate.

3. Number the paper plate as if it were the face of a clock beginning with "12" at the high-noon position and the number "6" directly across. Make four equally-spaced hash marks in between each number to represent the minutes.

4. Place the brad through the holes on the arrows. Then place the brad in the hole in the paper plate. Stretch out the prongs of the brad so that it is securely fastened to the arrows and the plate. You have now created a make-shift clock face.

5. Adjust the arrow hands to represent different hours and minutes. The small hand represents the hour. If the small hand is on or to the right of a number (going clockwise), it is that hour. Even if the small hand is touching but still to the left of the 3, it is still the hour of 2. Whatever hash the minute hand is on or to the right of (going clockwise) represents the minute. Because there are 60 minutes in an hour, the minute can be any number between 0 and 59. For example, if the hour hand is to the right of the 6 and the minute hand is to the right of the third hash mark after the 7, then it is 6:38.

Tips & Warnings

• If you are having students create their own teaching aid, you may want to cut out the minute and hour hands yourself beforehand so that the students will not have to handle sharp scissors.

References

• Free Kids Crafts: Paper Plate Clock
• ArcyTech.org: Learning to Tell Time