Montessori Activity: Telling Time

IKEA Dekad Alarm Clock 49 DKK

Age: From 4 years old

Duration: 5-10 minutes

Materials:
1. 1 old-fashion alarm clock
2. 1 tray

Directions:
1. Show your child how to read the current time e.g. 8 o'clock.
2. Turn the alarm clock 8 times, and tell your child that when the hour hand turns 8 times, it will be morning 6 o'clock.
3. Turn on the alarm and tell your child that you have set the alarm to ring in 10 hours' time.

Additional Information:
J is very interested in telling time. With the timer that I use since he was a baby, he understood the concept of 5 minutes to 1 hour, as I set the time to 5 minutes and waited together with him until it rings. However, the timer could not allow us to set it to 10 hours. So J asked for an alarm clock.

IKEA is probably the best place to find a functional clock that shows the numbers clearly, thus good for teaching aid, and if the child breaks it, you will not feel heart pain :-) After a great day at the farm for Økodag, Daddy and I brought J to IKEA and he chose the alarm clock  himself. It is very cheap - 49 DKK (there is a cheaper one that costed only 8 DKK, but it didn't appeal to J).

So it will be our Montessori lesson this evening.

The link belows show many other varied way to teach children time which I will try sometime when J is older around 5 years old:

http://www.wikihow.com/Teach-Kids-to-Tell-Time

We also bought a big clock for teaching him time, which costed only 15 DKK from IKEA:

IKEA Rusch Wall Clock 15 DKK