Year 2 Rock the Clock

I went down to visit Year 2, to catch up with all my friends down there and to see what they were doing.

Capitano Amazing, aka Mr Black, had them making their own clocks. They were pretty good at it - here is one clock face that has been divided into 60 equal parts. Great job!

The next challenge was to make some hands so we asked the kidlets, what two shapes could you use to make a clock hand?

You guessed it - a triangle and a rectangle. Wonder if there are any other combinations?

Then we all had to make a big one and a little one...

Nice going!

Oops! Too big!

Well, after we'd made the clocks and had a play with them, I wanted to explore a few number ideas that are related to time.

I put up the 100 chart on the Smartboard and started counting in 10s. What's the pattern? How do we know?

Then we counted in 5s. Same questions. What does it look like on the chart?

Then we did counting by 6. We've had a few parents getting anxious about kids needing to know their tables facts so I was interested to see how these Year 2 champs would come with counting by 6.

They smashed it.

Then we started to look at the patterns that were made.

"Well," said one legend, "If you look at the diagonal pattern on the right, the numbers are going up by 12. If you look at the diagonal pattern on the left, they are going up by 18."

Nice. And this is Year 2.

Next followed a conversation about multiples of 6, the number of minutes in an hour, the number of seconds in an hour, etc. Very enlightening.

Time for the final challenge

"Okay," I said, "You know that there are 60 minutes in an hour. What would an hour look like if one minute looked like this:

or this.....

or this....

or...

"Show me what an hour would look like."

And this is why I love teaching...

Because the kids come up with some crazy ideas that I had never anticipated.

There we go - 60 minutes!

Not convinced? Let me show you...

Ta da! 10 rows of 6 = 60

Or try this...

Don't believe this is 60 minutes?

How about this then? 12 x 5 = 60

And how long is an hour?

Ooh, about this long...

...or maybe this long.

Then we had the "Hour Tower"...

...and the "Block Clock"

What are you talking about???

And finally one bright little champion came up to me and said, "Here is an hour Mr Ferrington":

"What are you talking about? You've only got two blocks!" I exclaimed.

"Well, each block is 30 minutes," he replied patiently.

Come on teacher - keep up!

The End

So we got to the end of the afternoon and I congratulated the kids on doing a great job and working on maths for an hour and half.

"No - it was only and hour and quarter," said one.

"I think it was about an hour an 17 minutes," said another...