Time & Clocks

Learning to read a clock face

This one is a clock, not questions about a clock. The first gear shows a drawn face and asks what it says; then it hands the hands over and asks you to set them yourself. Reading a face and setting one are the two halves of the same skill, and the second is what proves a child has the first.

The face is drawn the way a teaching clock is drawn, not the way a wristwatch is. The hour numbers sit big and inside; the minute numbers — 5, 10, 15 and round — sit outside in a lighter color, because the hardest idea on a clock is that the same twelve marks mean two different things, and hiding one of them does not help. The two hands are different lengths and different colors, and in the step-by-step the one being talked about is the solid one.

The hour hand creeps. At half past three it sits between the three and the four, which is exactly what makes a child say half past four — so it is drawn where it really is, and the lesson says out loud that the hour is the number the short hand has gone past.

After the face come the things a clock is for: counting the minutes round in fives, quarter past and quarter to, a.m. and p.m., then how long something lasted. Elapsed time is drawn on an open number line, which is the method all four curricula name — up to the next hour first, then the whole hours, then the minutes left over. The last gear turns minutes into hours, days into weeks, and reads a twenty-four hour timetable.