How to Teach Kids to Tell Time: Where They Get Stuck and What Order to Use

In most school systems, telling the time is taught over the first three years of primary school. Children start with o’clock and half past, move on to five-minute steps, and then to the minute. That order is written into the curriculum documents of England, the United States and Japan.

Even so, plenty of preschoolers ask “what time is it?” long before school, and a child who can read the clock does make mornings a little easier. In this post I look at what the curricula expect, the places where children usually get stuck, the order I would teach it in, and some ways to practise at home.

When schools teach it

In England, the national curriculum for mathematics asks Year 1 pupils to “tell the time to the hour and half past the hour and draw the hands on a clock face to show these times”. In Year 2 they “tell and write the time to five minutes, including quarter past/to the hour”. In Year 3 they read an analogue clock including Roman numerals, and 12-hour and 24-hour clocks.

In the United States, the Common Core standards follow almost the same steps. Grade 1 says “Tell and write time in hours and half-hours using analog and digital clocks.” Grade 2 moves to “the nearest five minutes, using a.m. and p.m.”

In Japan, the elementary curriculum guidelines (2017) ask first graders to read the time in daily life, second graders to learn days, hours and minutes and how they relate, and third graders to learn seconds. The official commentary describes the first-grade goal as understanding how the positions of the short and long hands match the numbers in a time, by watching and turning a clock.

So in all three systems, a child who can’t read a clock before starting school is not behind.

Where children get stuck

A clock face packs several rules into one small circle, and most of them are not obvious to a young child.

Two hands with different jobs. The short hand shows the hour and the long hand shows the minutes. Both point at the same ring of numbers, so the first confusion is simply which hand to look at.

The long hand doesn’t mean the number it points to. When the long hand points at 1, it means 5 minutes. At 6, it means 30. Multiplying the printed number by five is a lot to ask of a child who has only just learned to count.

The short hand is usually between numbers. At 8:50 the short hand sits almost on the 9, and reading it as nine o’clock is a very natural mistake. Japan’s curriculum commentary gives a similar example, encouraging children to think “it’s past 8, but it isn’t 9 yet” by linking the clock to what is happening in their day.

It counts in sixties and twelves. Ordinary numbers carry over at ten. A clock carries over at 60 minutes and goes round every 12 hours. Schools leave this for later, and I don’t think it needs to be explained at the start.

The order I would teach it in

The curricula set out what each year should cover, but not the steps to take at home. What follows is my own suggestion.

1. O’clock

Start with clocks where the long hand always points straight up at 12. The child only reads the short hand, and the number it points to is the hour. It helps to learn early that “long hand at the top means o’clock”.

2. Half past

Next, clocks where the long hand points at 6. “Half past” means halfway round, which is easy to show. Look at the short hand too: at half past seven it sits halfway between 7 and 8.

3. Counting by fives

To get ready for the long hand, practise counting 5, 10, 15 and on. Running a finger around the numbers 1 to 12 and counting by fives out loud is enough.

4. Hours and minutes

Once counting by fives is easy, read times like 3:25. Stay with five-minute steps at first, and practise the rule that the short hand shows the number it has just passed. The single-minute marks can wait.

I think moving on only when a step is solid ends up being faster. If a child moves to minutes before o’clock is easy, the jobs of the two hands tend to blur.

Practising at home

Tie times to daily life. “Dinner is at seven.” “When the long hand reaches the 6, it’s bath time.” Linking the clock to fixed events in the day is what the Japanese commentary stresses too: not just reading times on worksheets, but using them at school and at home. The clock on your wall is the best teaching tool you have.

Play with a clock whose hands move. A toy clock or a paper one lets the child turn the hands. Seeing the short hand move one number while the long hand goes all the way round is easiest to understand by doing it. A geared clock, where both hands move together, shows this directly.

Write the minutes on the face. On a practice clock, write 5, 10, 15 and so on in small numbers outside the hour numbers. It gives the child a crutch for the long hand, and you can remove it once they no longer need it.

Keep it short. A few minutes is plenty. There are many chances in a normal day to look at a clock, so there is no need for long sessions at a table.

Analogue or digital first?

A digital clock shows the numbers directly, so reading it is easy. Still, I think it is better to start with an analogue clock. The hands make time visible as an amount: almost nine, only halfway there. And the clocks used for teaching at school have hands.

That said, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. If there is a digital display at home, putting it next to an analogue clock and showing that both say the same time in two different ways can help some children.

What BrainDojo Kids can do

BrainDojo Kids is an iPhone and iPad app for ages three to six. One of its games, What’s the time?, is about reading a clock.

What’s the time? covers only the first step in this post: o’clock. A clock with numbers appears, and the long hand always points to 12. The child looks at it and writes the hour by hand. Each round has five questions, and from the third one the whole clock is tilted. The numbers no longer sit upright, so the child has to find which number the short hand points to. Half past and minutes are not included, so those steps are for the clock at home.

The game appears when a player’s age is set to five or six. It is free on days when it is one of the day’s Today’s Training or Recommended picks. On other days it is a premium game, but every game can be tried once for free.

In the parent settings there is a daily time limit, on by default at 10 minutes. There are no ads and no account to create. Because the answer is written as a number, the game may be early for a child who can’t write numbers yet. I wrote about when children start writing in When Do Kids Start Writing Letters?

Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids covers the first session, and Practical Tips for Using BrainDojo Kids Every Day has ideas for keeping it going.