Year 2 Time
Learning about time is crucial in Year 2 (age 6-7) and we have a separate category devoted to it. Children should enter the year familiar with an analogue clock face and being able to read the time using a clock face to the hour and to the half hour. They should also be familiar with the order of the days of the week and the months of the year, although this will need to be revisited in Year 2. We have some great pages on both days of the week and months of the year for Year 2 children, including our latest resources on ordering birthdays.
Work on the analogue clock face continues, firstly with telling the time to the quarter hour and then reading the time to 5 minutes. Again, a large clock face with hands is an invaluable resource. A good way to practise this is for children to draw the hands on a clock face to show these times and we have templates showing clock faces without hands which can be easily printed out. Children will need a good deal of practice reading the time to 5 minutes (e.g. 5 to nine, 10 past nine, 25 to ten etc.) and learning about the complexities of to and from the hour. It is interesting to note that we don’t say, ‘40 minutes past eight’, but we do say ‘eight forty’ or ‘20 to nine’.
Further work will be carried out on ordering sequences of time, such as putting these times in order, starting with the smallest:
20 minutes a quarter of an hour 10 minutes
This will need the knowledge that an hour is made up of 60 minutes, a half hour is thirty minutes and a quarter of an hour is 15 minutes.
It is surprising how many children struggle with analogue clocks, especially now that fewer children wear a watch, preferring to use digital displays on phones etc. Reading a time on a digital clock comes later.