Clock Face and Hands Match
Your child sets the hands on a paper clock to match a card, and the card says what happens at that time in his own day.
- Age
- 5 to 7, best at 5
- Setup
- 15 min, once
- Play
- 10 to 20 min
- Materials
- Household only
- Mess
- None
- You
- Set it up, then leave
Activity KG-A038
What you need
One paper plate, one split pin and twelve cards. The cards are where the work goes, because a clock set to half past seven means nothing until half past seven is porridge.
- A card circle about 20 cm acrossx1 Or: a paper plate. Or the back of a cereal box drawn round a dinner plate. Twenty centimetres leaves room for two rings of numbers, hours inside and minutes outside, without them running together. On a smaller face the two rings collide, and the clock becomes hard to read at exactly the moment it should be getting easy.
- A split pinx1 Or: a paper clip opened into an S, pushed through and folded flat behind. Or a small bolt with a nut, which turns the most smoothly of the three. The hands have to turn and then stay where they were put. Glue or tape kills the activity outright, because moving the hands is the entire point.
- Card for two hands, in two colours6 cm and 9 cm Or: one strip coloured in with a red pen and one with a blue. Length is the only thing telling a five year old which hand is which, so make the difference large. Six against nine reads as different across the table; seven against eight does not, and the whole clock stops working.
- Twelve small cards, 6 by 9 cmx12 One time on each, and underneath it the thing that happens then in this house. Generic times slide off; the card that says half past three, the school gate, does not.
- A red and a blue markerx1 each Hour numbers red, minute numbers blue, hour hand red, minute hand blue. The colour does the explaining, so you do not have to say which hand goes with which ring more than once.
- A clock with hands, somewhere he walks pastx1 Or: the kitchen, the hall, a wristwatch on your arm. The paper clock is the practice and the wall clock is the point. Hang it at his eye height rather than above the door, and the transfer happens on its own over a few weeks.
How to set it up
- Draw round a plate, cut the circle out, and fold it in quarters so the creases mark twelve, three, six and nine.4 min
- Write the twelve hour numbers in red on the creases and between them, then the minutes, five to sixty, in blue just outside each one.5 min
- Cut a 6 cm red hand and a 9 cm blue one, punch both, and fix them through the centre with the split pin.3 min
- Write twelve cards, each with a time on one line and what happens then on the next.4 min
- Set the clock to one time yourself, read it out loud, and hand him the stack.30 sec
What to say and what to do
Say
Where is the short hand pointing?
Set it to seven o'clock. That is the one where the bus comes.
- Read the hour first, every single time, before the minutes come into it at all.
Do
- Write the cards from a real day, in order, and start with the four that matter most to him. Dinner, bath, the programme he watches, the time you come home.
- Play it the other way round about a third of the time: you set the hands, he finds the card. Reading a clock and setting one are two different jobs and only one of them gets practised otherwise.
- Take the last three cards of a sitting over to the wall clock and do them standing under it. That short walk is what moves this off the table.
Let be
- The hour hand parked exactly on a number when it should have drifted past. Getting the hour right at all is the larger half of reading a clock.
- Times read aloud as twenty hundred rather than eight, if that is what the oven and the television say. Both are correct and the child can hold both.
- Cards laid out in the order of his day rather than the order you shuffled them into. That is a second, harder thing he has just done.
What it looks like when it is working
- He calls the short hand the hour hand without anyone prompting him.
- She sets the clock, then looks up at the wall clock to compare.
- Half past starts turning up in ordinary conversation about the day rather than only at the table.
- He notices the hour hand sitting between two numbers and reads the lower one on purpose.
What to expect at each age
At five
Reads and sets o'clock times reliably, and half past with a bit of thought. Puts the hour hand straight onto the number for half past, which is how everyone starts.
The hour hand's slow drift between two numbers is the next thing to arrive, and it usually arrives by being watched rather than explained.
Lasts 10 to 15 minutes
At six
Handles half past confidently, reads quarter past, and starts to place the hour hand between numbers. Begins using the clock to answer her own questions about how long until something.
Quarter to is the harder of the pair, because it is the first time the clock is read backwards from the hour ahead.
Lasts 15 to 20 minutes
At seven
Reads to five minutes, works out quarter to, and does simple elapsed time out loud: we leave in twenty minutes, so the hands will be there.
This is the point where a clock stops being an activity and becomes a tool, and the paper one gets retired to the drawer.
Lasts 20 minutes or more
When it goes sideways
Each of these is the clock telling you which part of it is doing the work, and each one moves with a single change.
He reads the long hand as the hour
Two hands on one face, and length is not yet the obvious cue. It is the single most common thing at five and it has nothing to do with how well he is getting on.
Take the minute hand off completely for a few days. With one hand on the clock, a bit after three is both readable and correct, and it is exactly how the hour hand really works.
She can read the cards but cannot set the hands
Recognising and producing are separate jobs, and recognising comes first in every skill there is.
Swap roles for a while. You set the hands and she hunts through the stack for the matching card, which gives the same practice from the easier end.
Half past three, and the hour hand is on the three
The hour hand's creep between numbers is invisible if it only ever gets placed on numbers. Nobody has seen it move yet.
Hold the clock and turn only the minute hand, slowly, one full circle, while he watches the short one crawl from three to four. It needs to be seen once and then it is known.
He is fluent at the table and blank at the kitchen clock
The paper clock is large, still, and colour coded. The kitchen one is none of those, so it reads as a different object entirely.
Move the game under the wall clock for the last few cards, and give him one real job a day: tell me when the long hand gets to the six.
Making it harder
Four rungs on one paper plate. Only the cards change, and each rung adds one new thing the hands have to say.
O'clock only
- Ready when
- This is where everybody starts.
- What changes
- Four cards, four whole hours, the minute hand always straight up.
- What is new
- That the short hand names the hour, and the long one has a home at the top.
Half past
- Ready when
- She sets four o'clock times without checking the numbers one by one.
- What changes
- Eight cards, half of them on the half hour, minute hand pointing down.
- What is new
- The face has halves, and the hour hand has moved halfway to the next number.
Quarter past and quarter to
- Ready when
- He puts the hour hand between two numbers for half past, without a reminder.
- What changes
- Twelve cards with quarters on them, and the blue minute ring gets pointed at for the first time.
- What is new
- Quarter to, which is read from the hour ahead and is the first time the clock runs backwards.
Five minutes, and how long until
- Ready when
- She reads all four quarter positions without pausing.
- What changes
- Cards that say a time and a question: we leave in twenty minutes, set the clock to when that is.
- What is new
- Elapsed time, which turns the clock from something to read into something to think with.
Finish a sitting with a card still in the stack, and leave the clock set to the next real thing that is going to happen. A paper clock sitting on the shelf at half past five, with dinner at half past five, gets checked against the wall all afternoon.
How to keep it safe
One sharp point and one pair of scissors, and both of them are yours.
- You push the split pin through and fold both legs flat against the back, then cover them with a square of tape. The folded legs are the only sharp thing on this.
- You cut the circle out. Cutting a clean 20 cm circle from stiff card wants adult scissors, and everything after that a five year old can do.
- A paper clip bent into a hinge is a good substitute for the pin, and it wants the same treatment: ends folded in, tape over the back.
Why this helps
From the guide The claims here follow our guide on how patience actually develops.
An analogue clock is a measuring instrument where the number you want is not written anywhere. Two hands run around the same circle at different speeds, and each one is read against a different scale that happens to be printed in the same place. That is a genuinely unusual thing to ask a five year old to do, and it is why children who count fluently to a hundred still cannot tell you it is twenty past four.
Matching the hands to cards from the child's own day is what supplies the missing half. A time is a quantity, and quantities need something to hold onto: half past seven is the porridge, half past three is the gate, seven o'clock is the bath. Once a few of those are fixed, the ones in between get estimated rather than decoded, and that is the moment a clock starts being useful rather than being homework.
Skill practised: reading two moving scales on one face, and giving a time a size
This is not maths practice with a clock stuck on the front. A five year old learns the clock because it says when the things that matter to him happen.
One a week, at your child's age
We publish one new activity a week at each age, in exactly this format. The one worth seeing rather than reading here is the minute hand going round a full circle while the hour hand crawls, which explains half past better than any sentence does.
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Questions parents ask
Should we teach digital or analogue first?
Run both at once and let them explain each other. Write the digital time on the card and set the hands to match it, and the two notations stop being separate subjects. The hands are the harder of the two and also the more useful for a five year old, because the position of a hand shows how much of the hour is left, which a row of digits does not.
We use the twenty four hour clock at home. Does that confuse it?
It does not, and it is worth putting on the cards. Ovens, station boards and television listings all show 19:00, so write both on the evening cards, 19:00 and seven o'clock, and let them sit side by side. Children pick up the pairing quickly, and it saves a separate lesson later.
How many times should be on the cards at the start?
Four, and all of them whole hours from his own day. Twelve cards is the second month. The point of a short stack at the beginning is that he gets to the end of it, which is what makes him ask for it again.
She has learnt all twelve cards by heart. Is she reading the clock or remembering?
Probably some of each, which is fine and normal. Turn it over by setting the hands yourself to a time that is not on any card and asking what it says. If that stalls, it was memory, and the fix is new cards with different times on them rather than anything harder.