Happy new year! We've started back to school this week and one of the topics we're working on is telling time and reading a clock.
This topic had been a challenge for my five year old, and myself in teaching it. We've been working on time on and off for a few weeks.
Through this lesson, I've continued to learn more about how to approach challenging topics with him. He often wants to give up when he doesnt get it right away. Since it was his interest that prompted learning about time at this age, I did not allow us to put it on the back burner. I continued to encourage him to take his time and think back to the basics, which one is the hour hand, which is the minute hand, etc.
A challenging part of learning to read the correct hour was that the hour hand didnt stay pointed at the hour. When the hour hand would get close to a new number we discussed how to identify which was the right number. Since we've previously learned counting by 5's, he uses that skill to count out the minutes, which has been pretty successful.
On Monday I set up a quiz using flash cards, he was to fill in the blanks woth the correct hour and minutes. He was reluctant at first as he didn't want to get some thing wrong. Again encouragement and patience was my approach, and not letting him give up. Once he made up his mind to attempt the problems he used the strategies we worked to correctly read the clocks. Once he "got it" he was ready to do another round. He was proud of himself, and I was proud too, especially seeing him work through the mental blocks that often stop him from trying.
I am reinforcing this lesson by asking him to tell me the time throughout the day. We will soon learn to memorize the minutes associated with the numbers on the clock without counting by 5's. Also we will be learning the different ways to say the time, like "quarter after two".
I'm still enjoying homeschooling this little guy, seeing things click in his mind and seeing him grow and overcome challenges is quite amazing.
