8 steps to teach your child to read the clock

Time is a difficult thing for a child to understand. Everything that is unpleasant for him is "tomorrow", and all that he wants is "now". But if the kid goes to school soon, he will be quite strict schedule, which is impossible to observe if you do not know how to determine the time by the clock. How to teach him to understand time?

1. Talk with your baby about what morning, day, evening and night are, what happens in each of these intervals, what the baby does in each of these periods of the day. Show him the digital clock and explain why people even know what time it is.

2. Draw a poster for your daily routine. It should indicate the time and action. For example, 7:00 - get up, 7:30 - breakfast, and so on. Let the poster hang in a prominent place so that the baby visually remembers what the image of time looks like. Place an electronic clock next to it, with which the child can check.

3. When the baby has more or less mastered the digital clock, you can move on to the clock with hands. Show that there is a large minute hand and a small hour hand. Draw an analogy with an electronic clock, where the left side shows the hour and the right side shows the minutes. Tell us how time on a dial differs from an electronic clock: there are no numbers from 13 to 24 - instead, the hour hand goes around the clock twice.

Draw parallels between 1 pm and 1 pm, 2 pm and 2 pm - etc. Initially, it can be difficult for a child to master minutes on the dial, so it will be enough to explain where the counting point of minutes is and where the hand points to 30 minutes.

4. Take a poster with a daily routine and show on the watch face what it looks like when your baby wakes up, dines, goes to class, etc. For first show yourself, then ask questions - and the child will have to show with an hour hand the hour at which he is performing this or that task.

5. Draw on the poster the dials on which the same time as on the electronic clock is shown by the corresponding position of the hands.

6. It will be easier for the child to understand the minutes on the dial if it is signed, where 10 minutes, where 25, etc. Accordingly, it is better to study on a watch where there are such designations, or take a toy dial and add on him minutes. Explain to the child how it happened that the number 1 means 5 minutes, and the number 4 means 20, etc.

7. Help your child practice. The main thing is to do it gently and not to put pressure on him, not to scold him for mistakes. During the day, pay the child's attention to the electronic clock and dial, ask how many hours and how many minutes they show, praise for correct or even partially correct answers. Remember that not even all adults know how to tell the time by a clock with an arrow.

8. Present your child with a wristwatch. Your own watch is a great motivation to learn to understand the time by it.

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