Clocks and Time

What time is it? Read the clock, then find the clock that matches.

Book Measure and tell time 1.MD.B.3 ALPACA · Early number

New to clocks? Start here. A short lesson with a clock you can watch move, and then move yourself. Nothing to get wrong, and it takes about 8 minutes.

Show me how a clock works → How does a clock work again?

▤ Print this All of 1st grade

For grown-ups

How long: 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Short and frequent beats long and occasional — the early-numeracy trials with the largest effects ran eight weeks or less.
When they get one wrong: the page shows the working. Read it together rather than moving straight on. Feedback that explains is worth several times more than feedback that only marks right or wrong, and that gap is wider in maths than in any other subject.
Not timed: thinking time is the point of a book. Let silences run.
Print it too: doing the same problems on paper a few days later is worth more than doing twice as many today.

What this practises

Telling and writing time to the hour and half hour, on analog and digital clocks.

Stated plainly, because the site does not claim what it cannot support: there is no efficacy trial behind this activity. What exists is a descriptive literature on the acquisition order — hour, half hour, quarter, five minutes, minute, confirmed across grades 1 to 3, with "past" easier than "to" — and consistent teaching guidance that the hour-hand error is corrected by watching the hand travel rather than by being told. That is a claim about a mechanism, not an effect size, and it is why the animated lesson exists and why the ordering stops at the half hour. The coverage argument is the stronger one: 1.MD.B.3 asks for analog and digital, and the catalogue had one activity that mixed clocks with rulers.

The underlying idea: The hour hand is the difficult one. It moves continuously, so at half past it sits between two numbers, and a child taught only "the short hand points at the hour" will read the larger of the two. Every item kind here either states where the short hand is or asks for it.
Where this sits in Illustrative Mathematics: 1st grade Unit 7: Geometry and Time
Sources: Illustrative Mathematics / Kendall Hunt (2024) · Illustrative Mathematics (2024) all references →

Related measured skill: ALPACA · Early number. What this means