Cosmas Student Work

The piece of student work is from a lesson I just recently did on time using both the hour and minute hands.  My first grade students caught on very quickly to telling time to the hour.  They are able to identify “o’clock” times with the minute hand pointing straight up very quickly.  However, they have trouble using the minute hand as well to make a complete time.  The students (for the most part) understand and can show me by pointing how each number stands for an interval of 5 minutes when the minute hand is pointing to it, however, they have difficulty taking that knowledge and constructing a time out of it such as 6:15 or 9:30. 

              This piece of work is particularly interesting because I had a side conversation with this student after they completed it that contradicts their written work.  The sheet depicts four clocks that are blank and students need to draw the hands for 6:30, 5:40, 6:00, and 6:20.  After the hands are drawn there is a space for them to write the time out in ___:___ notation.  This student’s sheet has hands drawn on the first clock to show “6:00” which is incorrect for 6:30.  Then, the times he depicted read 6:3, 3:5, 12:6, 7:3.  From this work I am to assume that the student doesn’t understand the counting by 5’s interval to find what the minute hand is pointing to.  However, once I saw this I had a conversation with him about what we had learned about finding the number that the minute hand represents.  He repeated to me that we count by 5’s and did so with his fingers for the first example arriving correctly at the 30.  I then told him to put it together piece by piece, the hour then the minute and he arrived at 6:30.  What was most interesting though was that after he turned this in I noticed he made a mistake on the 6:00 example which we had been over numerous times and he had demonstrated he understood.  This was the problem where he wrote 12:6.  Even though he knew one hand should point to the 12 and the other on the 6, he flipped them when writing it out and was confused again about what the minute hand represents.

              When thinking about this student’s work first I think that there is an obvious misunderstanding of how the numbers on the clock face could mean anything else.  This is a difficult concept for any first grader to handle.  Though he knows how to count by 5’s around the clock, he hasn’t concreted the idea that when the minute hand points to those numbers, they are read differently.  I think one thing that would help this student would be using real-world examples of times to rule out “non-sense” times.  For example, ask him if he has ever heard of a time that is 6:3 or 3:5.  The answer will (hopefully) be no, and we can then take a more logical look at what the clock is trying to tell us.  Giving him a way to self-check whether what he has come up with makes sense will be a great tool for using some problem solving to arrive at the correct answer.