To think this is the most frustrating thing anybody ever had to teach a child!!

[Lunar1]

Teaching DS1 to tell the time! We'd got o'clock, half past and the quarters. He was consistent so we moved on to twenty past and to. Again really good, and this was over the last year so not all crammed into a week. 3 weeks ago we started looking at minutes.

He has lost all concept of the time, says bizarre things when I ask what time it is. Even when it's an o'clock! I know it will just be processing the new information, but it's worse than toilet training!!

AIBU to think this is the most frustrating thing on earth. No ds1 it's not 80.1 o clock!! Maybe this is one I should leave to the school .

Before I clicked on this I KNEW it would be about telling the time

DS is also 7 about to go into Y3, got GDS in Maths, praise for his brilliant numerical skills, is in the chess team etc.

Can he tell the time? Can he fuck. His math books are full of ticks, every single problem solved accurately. Except the time sections. Covered in XXXs and corrections.

I tried teaching him the time and realised it makes no sense whatsoever. The Dave Allen video has it spot on. It's a ridiculous system. Why we've stuck with it, I've no idea. I suspect it's a Swiss conspiracy to sell watches.

Do you think MN will support a campaign to abolish analogue time before the end of the summer?

After watching that video lm proud to thinkl managed to teach hundreds of kids to read the time. And it is sometimes the ones you least expect who have difficulty with it. My ds 20 cannot still read a clock with no numbers. The little dots or roman numerals mean nothing to him.

Found this app really useful:
play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.giggleup.ITTA

Lots of clock face options and levels.

I knew this would be about time!
There were quite a few time related questions in the KS2 maths papers this year. I watched a child who would have coasted to an old level 6, completely muck up the time table questions!
I have actually ditched teaching quarter to and past and go straight to 5 min intervals to and past (which is just 5 times table of course) as the thing they find difficult is the to and past bit! Once they have this mastered you can say that 15 to and past have a special name, what it is and why it makes sense. For those struggling with time, throwing in fractions into the mix can really disorientated some, not others of course!
Have a gold star for doing it at home though, it really only comes with enough practise.

Time teacher clock my then 4yr old learnt how to tell the time less than 24 hours after getting it and putting it up.

My daughter cannot tell the time from an analogue clock. She has tried and tried but can't interpret the information. Digital all the way for her.

She can tie shoelaces though.

Get into a debate with her about Syria or the Referendum etc and she will have you doubting your own mind. My OH made that mistake -twice - and they happily argued for hours. 'Twas bliss, I tell you, bliss.

She still can't tell the time but that doesn't matter. She can hold her own in discussions.

I'm a ta and work on a 1:2 basis most frustrating lesson I've ever done was trying to tell the time we started off with o'clock quarter past half past with a view to moving on to 5 minute intervals once they'd got that, they just didn't get it at all, regretted introducing it in the month before the end of school, but is one of the goals for next year, plus would save my sanity if they could tell the time instead of asking me every 10 minutes what time is it miss?

Yes to Dave Allen!!

Phew glad it's not just me/DS1 then! Ditto with the good at maths, chess but time, nah.

I'm so glad it's not just me and ds! I'm going to carry on, it feels like toilet training in that I'm just going to have to push on and keep asking him what time it is, even though he just said its 10.33. At least there is a little logic to that one.

I'm hoping ds2 somehow learns at the same time so I don't have to do this again.

My very bright dgd is dyspraxic and , despite being academically brilliant in most areas, she still struggles with telling the time on an analogue clock! She is 15 now and didn't tell anyone she was struggling until she was going to secondary school and worried about knowing when she should be somewhere. She confided in me and I took her out and bought her a digital watch. It honestly transformed her life.

I have to do the wages for my staff at work
A paid day is 7 and 1/2 hours and I have to work out overtime and add it all up over the month.
It does my head in as lunch is an hour unpaid but most days they have 30 mins
I have to look at the time sheet and work out the overtime, rounding it down to the nearest quarter of hour

It sounds simple enough but its not my favourite bit of my job
It is checked by somebody else and so far my maths has been good

But oh my God, those quarters of an hour do give me grief

Have the same with my Dd who has just turned 7. We're still struggling with her 5 times tables though, so I'm not pushing the time telling just yet.

All these examples are a piece of piss compared to teaching a 2 year old with no sense of urgency how to eat an ice lolly.

Oh god, toomuch, flashbacks to yesterday when my weeping, wailing 2yo DD ran in from the garden to complain that her mini milk was melting. WELL EAT IT THEN

Starting to think I'm not cut out for parenting - that would drive me nuts. My DS is 2.5 and I'm already being driven insane by his obsession with doing jigsaw puzzles and his insistence of cramming them together any old how then getting furious that they don't fit properly, screaming for help but going insane when I touch the pieces. I thought i was a patient person until recently.

Oh god, my 5 yo can tell the time, but can she eat an ice lolly...!?

DC just 'got' it, but I remember being much older than 5 and struggling despite being top of the class in most other areas. I still often hesitate a split second when reading the time, especially when there are no numbers. I suppose it connects more readily with some brains than with others.

YABU - I see your telling the time, and raise you tying shoe laces. Even thinking about it is giving me the rage.

I think the average child isn't ready to tell the time properly until they turn 8.
O'clocks, yes, but the rest? Rarely before 8.
I also agree that the expectations of the new NC as regards time are ridiculous.

It's because time is too abstract for him at the moment. Instead of going for him telling the time, why not go at it a different way...When you do something, say 'it's half past seven - time for breakfast' and show him the clock. Or 'it's 6 o clock, time for tea'. Then, after a while, ask him when you should have breakfast/tea etc and he will say 'half past seven is a good time' and then you can look at a watch together and work out when that will be. Movable hands are good, so he can experiment with moving the hour hand and then the minute hand until he finds half past seven or seven thirty.

It's all about experimenting and working it all out to begin with, rather than learning how to tell the time straight off.

Ipad app will save your sanity

Essentially, they will only 'get it' when their minds are ready to understand why time is important at all. There are actually lots of elements involved in telling the time.

Same with shoe laces. The child needs to have developed:

1. The mindset that they want to tie them themselves (independence)
2. The fine motor skills to tie laces
3. Have it modelled to them
4. Have lots of practice. One day, like riding a bike, they'll 'want' to do it and sit down and practice like mad until they get it. That's when all the above come together like pieces of a puzzle.

You can't rush it, but you can model it and give them tips/tactics to make it easier to do/understand.

I was academically a very bright child, extremely good at reading and not bad at maths either. However I really struggled with the time and still get cold chills remembering the workbooks with blank faces in which we had to draw in the hands. I did crack it but I must have been 11 or 12 by then (digital watches in the 80s made me stop trying for a while).

Looking back, I think that one of the problems may have been that nobody explained to me that, as the minute hand moves around, the hour hand also moves to get steadily closer to the next "O'clock". I think that was possibly what threw me , daft as it now seems. Certainly when you start to learn a teacher will draw in, say, half past three with the hour hand dead on the three rather than halfway between the three and the four. So graduating to a real clock is confusing!