“What time is it?” is the most common question asked by people when you are out and it’s deniably the most important skill. For the same reason, it’s important to teach your kids how to tell time but it can be confusing. If you want to teach kids how to tell time, this is the right guide!
The Importance Of Teaching Kids How To Tell Time
Telling the correct time is essential to keep everything organized and complete tasks on time. For instance, it helps them run to class on time and catch the bus. Similarly, when kids learn how to tell time, it’s a great milestone and makes them feel independent. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it teaches kids how to control several aspects of their lives. But again, telling time can be challenging for kids because it demands them to know numbers and what type of clock they’ve access to. To make things easier, we are sharing the time-teaching guide in Chinese for kids, so they can learn how to tell time!
Expressing Time In The English Language
When it comes down to telling or expressing time in English, there are different ways to do it. First of all, the most popular method is telling the hour or just use military time. For this purpose, kids should be taught that one day has 24 hours and every hour constitutes 60 minutes. So, just tell your kids that the first number is hours and the second one means the minutes.
Talk About Hours
Talking about hours is the easiest way of telling time, and it’s all about teaching kids that there are 24 hours in one day. In addition, a day is divided into two parts of twelve hours, such as AM hours and PM hours. AM hours are for mornings and about the time before midday. On the other hand, PM hours are for evenings and about time after midday.
O’clock
O’clock is the term used for a full hour and it doesn’t include minutes. For instance, if someone says 5 o’clock, it means that there are no additional minutes. However, it’s important to add AM or PM in front of the time to tell if it’s daytime or nighttime.
Military Time
Military time is about expressing the hours of a day and numbers range from 0 to 24. That being said, the midnight 12 o’clock is expressed as 0:00 while noon 12 o’clock is expressed as 12:00. With military time, there is no need to add AM or PM with the time.
Talk About Minutes
Now that we have cleared about telling hours, let’s see how to teach kids about expressing minutes. There are two primary ways of telling minutes in the English language. The first way is reading the numbers where the first one represents hours and the second number represents minutes. For instance, 11:07 means eleven oh seven (yes, the zero is pronounced as oh). On the other hand, if the time is 08:24, the kids would day eight twenty-four. Other terms related to minutes include the following:
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- Half-past – it shows how half minutes of the hours have passed.
- Quarter to/Quarter past – it shows how fifteen minutes after one hour have passed as well as when fifteen minutes left in completing the hour.
- Past/To/Till/Until – to is used for telling the minutes until an hour while until and till are used for some hours until something happens (i.e., it’s ten minutes until/till the school bus arrives).
Expressing Time Of Day
For the most part, telling the hour and minute is the more accurate way of telling time but you can initiate time learning by expressing the time of the day. It’s not specific but it will get them started. Some of these terms include:
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- Sunrise – it’s the time when the sun comes out from the night and day starts.
- Morning – it’s the time after sunrise and before noon starts (it stays from six in the morning to 12 in the noon).
- Noon – this is the day’s middle time and it starts after 12 PM.
- Afternoon – it starts after midday as it starts from 1 PM and ranges up to 5 PM or 6 PM.
- Sunset – as the name suggests, it’s the time of day when the sun starts setting and the light goes out.
- Evening – it starts after the sun sets and goes up to 10 PM.
- Night – night is after 10 PM and is referred until the sun rises.
- Midnight – 12 AM is considered midnight or 24h if someone is following the military hours.
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To learn more about telling the time for kids, you can download the Galaxy Kids app – the best English learning app for kids!
