Time for Fun!

For our summer session, we not only wanted to focus on reading, but we also wanted to beef up our math skills. I have the philosophy that most of our math is taught as if we were looking into the pet store windows watching all the puppies play. Kind of boring and uninvolved, right? Well, I wanted us to go inside the pet store and get directly involved, or play with the puppies. This is tons more fun, and some kids remember more when they can get physically involved in their learning. We had to get pretty creative, but we were lucky and basically had run of the building so we could use the wide spaces of the gym and the cafeteria whenever we wanted. I'm sure we could have made it work in the classroom too, but it was nice to have extra space (and the perfect circle in the center of the gym floor!).

Mrs. K came up with the idea, which I thought was fantastic - what better way to get the kids involved in their own learning than put them in charge of it! We gave them the supplies (numbers, hands, A.M./P.M. signs, and sun/moon signs), and they had to put all of it in the correct places.

The first day, we just had the hours, minutes, and hands. We had a little trouble putting the numbers in the right spots. It looked more like a Salvador Dali painting. So we asked if it was right, and the kids had to work together to fix it. Putting their minds together, they got it down! Then, Mrs. K or I would ask them a time and they had to move the hands to the right time.

The next day, we added A.M. and P.M. signs with pictures of a sun and a moon. Some times, time gets a little tricky since many kids associate A.M. with sun and P.M. with night-time/darkness. Again working together, and figuring it out on their own proved very beneficial.

During the last week, we added the tiny minute circles and started asking quarter-til, half-past, and quarter-after questions and drilled the connection between the key words: til=9, half=6, and after=3.

I would definitely do this again. The hands were made out of bulletin board paper (with a brad holding them together), the hours and minutes were construction paper, and the little minutes were construction paper circles cut with the Ellison cutter. We made sure to match colors as close as we could to our Judy clocks (red hands = red hour numbers, blue hands = blue minute numbers). We also worked hard to associate our 5 multiplication fact family with the clock.