Teaching time can be tricky, but it doesn’t have to be boring! With the right teaching time activities, you can turn this essential skill into a fun and engaging experience for your students. Whether you’re looking to get creative with hands-on activities or keep things simple with easy-to-use tools, these top ten activities will help your students master telling time in no time! Let’s dive into some exciting ways to make learning time a blast for everyone. 
Teaching Kids to Tell Time with Intentional Activities
In order to truly help my students master telling time, all of our practice activities are hands-on and concrete. By providing ample opportunities for students to physically create and manipulate clocks, students are MORE successful and have a deeper understanding of time. When teaching time is made fun, you’re creating experiences that students can draw from, and it’s more meaningful learning. Having a strong foundation built on concrete experiences has been one of the biggest contributors I’ve seen in student success with telling time. If you want to learn more about using concrete learning to help students in math, learn more HERE! Now to the activities!
#1 – Get Excited About Teaching Time
Before we teach anything, we have to engage our students. One way I do this with time is to tell them they’re about to learn a skill they will use every day, multiple times a day, for the rest of their lives. Instant engagement. They get SO intrigued. We start by discussing what we already know about time and then hop over to BrainPOP Jr. to gain some more background knowledge. They have a bunch of really great videos that really help students gain an understanding of time in a fun and quick way!
#2 – Create Your Own Clock
It’s time to get hands-on! Learning about clocks is so much fun when you bring it to life. One of my favorite ways to do this is by creating our own class clock on the carpet together with a hula hoop. The hula hoop provides a big enough circle for us to put all the pieces of the clock together. Students LOVE helping to assemble the clock and can really see how it works. The hands are labeled so students can learn the difference between the two hands and why we need them on a clock. It’s a perfect fun activity to begin learning how to tell time.
TELLING TIME ACTIVITIES
#3 – Teaching Time with All The Books
The next activity to keep teaching time fun and engaging is to read all the books! Not surprisingly, I love adding books anywhere they fit in and this is no different. Check out a list of books I love using for this skill, from teaching time to the hour to talking about seconds.
#4 – Give Great Visuals When Teaching Time
When it comes to teaching time, it can be challenging for students to understand how to read a clock when the hour hand isn’t pointing precisely to a number. One of my favorite ways to help students with this concept comes from Around the Kampfire! She uses pipe cleaners to make a hook so students can visually see what happens when the hour hand is in between two hours. This really helps students understand that only HALF the hour has already passed. It’s brilliant and easy!
#5 – What Time Is It?
Playing games is my favorite way to get students in ample practice while making it so fun they forget they are learning. We love to play a simple game called “What Time Is It?” throughout our entire unit. It can easily be played throughout your day! Randomly do a “time check” and students have to stop what they are doing to record the time. It’s an authentic and fun way to get practice writing the digital and analog time. I always add a little competition and see if students can record each time correctly to earn a prize! They get SO excited. Who knew teaching time could be so fun?
“What Time Is It?”
#6 – Teaching Time with Human Clocks
Here’s a fun and educational way to get students outside and moving! Students can use all their newly acquired clock skills by building their very own human clock with their classmates. You can work together as a class to construct and write the numbers all around the clock with some sidewalk chalk. Once your clock is drawn, students will shout out a time for kids to take turns becoming the hands on a clock. When you’ve finished with that activity, pair them off to create different analog and digital times on their own clocks. They love using chalk so give them some and let them go! They’ll have a great time, get some fresh air, and practice all those great time skills you’ve been working on. Check it out in action below!
#7 – Time for an ‘Egg’citing Hunt!
Our activities for teaching time stays fun with an “egg”citing time hunt! Who says you have to wait for Easter to have an egg hunt? This is a super simple and easy game to play and put together. All you need are: plastic eggs – one half with the analog time and the other half with the digital time written on them, some grass, a container, and a recording sheet. Once you have everything prepped, toss each egg shell in for students to hunt and find the matching times. When they find a match, they can put their egg together and record it on their sheet. I add numbers to the bottom of the egg so they know where to record their time. This game is SUPER engaging for students and a great way to practice analog and digital time!
#8 – Write the Room and Tell the Time
Write the Room activities are always a great way to get kids up and moving! Simply print out the task cards, stick them around the room, and let students explore. What’s more is you can grab this Telling Time Write the Room activity for FREE by subscribing now!
#9 – Roll A Clock
Roll A’Clock is another amazing game students love! This activity is an engaging way for students to practice telling and writing time! They simply roll the hour and minute dice and record the time. I like to laminate the clocks so they can be played over and over again. You can grab this fun activity for free HERE!
#10 – Teaching Time with Spin and Cover Games
Spin and cover games are another great way for students to have fun, collaborative practice. They will each choose a color and take turns spinning the spinner. They will cover the analog clocks around the board for the time that they spin. This will continue until all the clocks are covered. Whoever has the most times covered at the end… WINS!
THE BUNDLE
You can grab all these engaging, hands on time activities AND MORE HERE! This jam packed, growing time bundle includes ALL these, while saving YOU time and energy. Grab it now to have an engaging, fun, and hands on time unit that your students are sure to love and remember!
Time is a CRUCIAL life skill for students. Let’s help students not only be successful but also have FUN doing it! I really hope you enjoyed learning more about engaging teaching time activities! Don’t forget to subscribe to my email list! Not only will you get the most up to date tips, tricks, and classroom projects… and of course more fun FREEBIES including the Telling Time Write the Room FREEBIE! You will also have exclusive access to tons of digital how to videos! If you would like to learn about this and other things happening in my classroom follow me @sweetnsauerfirsties on Instagram.
To follow me on TPT and get all the latest updates on HALF OFF new products, click HERE!
Love these ideas but don’t want to lose them? Don’t forget it, PIN it below!
Leave a Reply