Telling the Time
By the end of Year 3, children can read an analogue clock to the nearest minute, including clocks that use Roman numerals from I to XII. They learn to count the minutes round the face, tell apart the "past" and "to" halves of the hour, and work out how long something takes from one moment to the next.
Practise Telling the Time
Have a guess, even if you're not sure. Get one wrong and we'll show you why, so every miss is a chance to learn.
Timed practice
The same practice, just with a gentle clock. Pick a length and see how many you can answer.
Good to know
Reading the clock
These clock faces show how to say a range of times: o'clock, quarter past, half past, ten past, ten to and quarter to.
A clock with Roman numerals
Some clocks use Roman numerals instead of digits. The hands work in exactly the same way, so read it as you always would.
For grown-ups
Telling the time is really two skills woven together: reading the position of the two hands, and understanding how seconds, minutes, hours, days and months fit inside one another. Once a child can count in fives round the dial and name a time like twenty-three minutes past, they can start measuring durations, the everyday maths of working out that a journey from quarter past nine to ten o'clock takes forty-five minutes. This sense of how units of time nest together underpins timetables, elapsed-time problems and the 24-hour clock that come in later years.
What is in this topic
- Reading an analogue clock to the nearest minute
- Clocks with Roman numerals
- Working out the time between two moments
- Units of time: seconds, minutes, hours, days and months
How to help at home
Telling the time clicks with a real clock, and little and often beats one long session.
- Keep a proper analogue clock where your child can see it, and ask the time at natural moments: before tea, at bedtime, when a programme starts.
- Sort the two hands out first. The short, fat hand is the hour and the long, thin hand is the minutes. Children mix them up far more than parents expect.
- Count the minutes in fives round the face together, pointing as you go: 5, 10, 15, 20 and on round to 55. Each big number is five minutes more.
- Once fives are solid, practise the single minutes between them, so they can read an awkward time like 7 minutes past or 23 minutes past to the exact minute.
- Some clocks use Roman numerals instead of figures: I, II and III for 1, 2 and 3, up to XII for 12. The hands work in exactly the same way, so once your child knows the letters they can read those clocks too.
Where children get stuck
The biggest muddle is reading the minute hand as if it were a number. A child sees the long hand on the 3 and says "three" instead of fifteen minutes past. The fix is to count in fives round the face every time at first: the 3 is the third jump of five, so 5, 10, 15, that is quarter past. With practice the count gets faster and then disappears.
The other sticking point is "to" times, because the spoken time jumps to the next hour. Quarter to 4 looks puzzling when the hour hand is still nearest the 3. Show them that once the big hand passes the 6 we count the minutes left until the top, and the hour we name is the one the short hand is heading towards. So quarter to 4 is 3:45 and ten to 9 is 8:50.