Week 14 Bode

          My first graders were working on telling time to the half hour earlier this week. The picture I have attached is a student’s work from their Everyday Math journals. For the most part this child is doing an average job on the assignment and in the classroom. I know this child and know that sometimes he doesn’t listen to directions so he can get confused or need the directions repeated when we go back to work at the desks. As I reviewed his work I noticed that he may know how to count by 2s (in problem number 3 page 38) however he didn’t follow the directions that you had to start at 12, 14, 16, and continue. He would have gotten the whole problem wrong if we were grading this. So it’s great that he was able to count by 2s but he has to follow directions and see where the number pattern is beginning. Telling time on the clock is his biggest struggle I’d say. He is normally good, as you can see, with telling time to the hour. He can see where the hour hand is pointing and also making the clock that needs to have that time. However, when it comes to telling time to the half hour this is where he has his difficulties. It seems that he gets the hour hand and minute hand confused. He isn’t sure which hand shows the “half-past” and which hand shows the hour. In the first clock on the top left you can see that he says its half-past 5. He got confused which hand was which and thought that the minute hand was the hour and so he felt that was close to 5. You see in the middle clock on the right the child was supposed to write the “half-past” part in and realize it wasn’t 8 o’clock but instead it was half-past 8 o’clock. This child saw that the hour hand was close to the 9 so anticipate that that’s why they wrote it was 9 o’clock but didn’t see the minute hand to check the half hour.

            I would say this child needs some help with telling time and realizing which hand means what and maybe more clarification as to what the word “half-past” means as well. One strategy I would use to help this child advance in their understanding would be to look at the model clock is go over the concept of how many minutes are in an hour (60) and that when you look at the clock doesn’t it look like circle (yes). So when you cut the circle in half straight up and down, what two numbers do they cut? (12 and 6). The 12 is what we point to when we say o’clock and it means that it is a whole hour. The 6 is what we point to when we say “half-past” because the 6 is half of 12 like we can see in this cut in half circle of the clock. The next thing I’d want to do is make the child try to remember the hour and minute hand by color-coding them. Maybe red would be the hour hand and blue could be the minute hand. By doing this the child will then be able to visualize how the hour and minute hand would and that they are not the same hand but in fact they mean something very different to each other. Hopefully these two ideas will help this student be able to visualize and understand the wording we use when referring to telling time.