Our Time Main Lesson took roughly three weeks to complete and we have spent the past three weeks practicing, practicing and practicing some more.
The children of Class Three are now confident in telling the time; a difficult skills for any child to pick up.
Here is the process we use at The London Acorn School to teach the time.
All of the following photos are of the children work.
Our Measurement Main Lesson spans the year for Class Three and begins with the measurement of time.
Later in the year we move into linear measurement of the space around us; measuring the classroom in feet, hands, cm, meters and exploring volume/capacity.
The children got to design their own Title Page for this Main Lesson book. We talked in class about one basic measurement being the year and its seasons. Something felt and seen by all of us in our beautiful park surroundings.
A year has four seasons; Spring Summer Autumn and Winter.
Having already drawn a tree on our title page to represent the measurement of seasons, we wanted to draw something a little different on our first page.
Together we constructed a couple of sentences to go into our books. Coming together to spell unfamiliar words and work in the correct punctuation.
We then talked about the measurement of a day being the movement of the sun across the sky
And how the moon lights our night.
This then lead to a discussion about the moon and its cycles being a month. How it can take a whole month for the moon to grow to full before shrinking back to a ‘new moon’ on the darkest night.
We then took our learning outside on a sunny morning and spent 45 minutes tracking the suns movements.
We talked about how a sundial was one of the first ways to formally measure the day.
We marked a line on the paper every 5 minutes and were amazed to see just how quickly the suns shadow was moving as the sun raced across the sky!
Every 5 to 10 minutes we drew another line on the paper. Trying to use a different colour each time.
We put our ‘sun shadows’ into our books and formulated a sentence together to explain what we had tried to measure.
We then talked about the measurement of a year and how we measure the year.
The children were excited to list the months they had learnt in Class Two in their books
We also talked about how many weeks and days we can find in a year.
Having measured a year, we then narrowed down time and measured the week.
The measurement of the week is done through the days and their names.
Together we listed and wrote the days of the week into our books. Talking briefly about their names and what they might mean.
Finally we arrived at the measurement of Time. Using a story about a Gnome Village and house numbers, we began exploring the clock and how to tell the time.
The story was a lot of fun to hear but we needed lots of practice before we became confident in telling the time.
We each made our own clock to use in practicing
And each week we have an entire Math Lesson to practice activities like this one.