The Creative Salad

We live in a world full of digital clocks. Our daughter checks the time on the stereo, on our cell phones, on the alarm clock in our bedroom. We don’t even own an analog clock in the house! Yet this is one skill that must be learned, along with cursive writing, also soon to be obsolete, but important nonetheless.

We love our wooden Plan Toys Activity Clock but don’t like that it’s only marked in hour increments:

So we decided to take matters into our own hands and add stickers marked in five-minute increments to the clock. This way our four-year old daughter, who is just learning about telling time on analog clocks, could more easily move the yellow minute hand to the right spot:

(We ended up swapping out the 60 minutes sticker for a 0 minute sticker — much easier for our daughter to grasp the concept of 1:00 with the ending matching!)

We also added hour and minute stickers to the hands of the clock:

Then we played the game, setting the clock to the times depicted in the cards that came with the clock:

We also picked up a copy of the Eeboo Time Telling Game that allows you to introduce telling time concepts in stages to your child, starting first with the hour increments, before moving to half-hour, quarter-hour, five-minute, and then all sixty minute increments:

We added hour and minute stickers to the hands on the clocks for this game too. We’ve been playing it quite a bit.

One of these days we’ll pick up an analog clock too so we can really practice.