Grade R All About Time

Time flies when you’re having fun, but if you've ever tried to explain to an impatient Grade R pupil that her birthday is a week away, you'll realize that the concept of time does not come easily to children of this age. In the classroom, we use ‘timely’ words such as yesterday, today, tomorrow which helps to make the concept of time more concrete. We learn the days of the week; months of the year and the girls practice what day/month comes before/after.

We have spent the week teaching the girls to tell the time to the nearest hour. The girls were shown that the ‘hands’ of a clock move around in a “clockwise” direction all the time. The longer hand is the minute hand, and the shorter hand designates the hour. There are 60 minutes in an hour (we even counted in 5’s up to 60 as we moved from number 12 around the clock and back to number12.)

Lots of opportunities to collaborate and work as a team were created as the girls had fun making a clock face out of natural materials. The girls collected stones and sticks and built a ‘stone-age’ clock. We then played games where the girls had to change the time according to the instruction. E.g., It is home time – 1 o’clock.

Grade R is such fun!