Time To Put Matters Right In Maths

Time to put matters right in maths.... It came as a shock to me that my then Yr 6 child could not tell the time from the clock in my kitchen when I asked! I just had assumed that she would know this, and after recovering from the temporary 'failure as a parent' guilt trip, set about putting matters right. I realised up until the age of ten she had only used digital watches and alarms. Many children use mobile phones as their time source, and their times are often expressed digitally. A further discovery I made that the 24 hour clock is not understood by many secondary pupils, and they could not read bus or train timetables. While teaching GCSE re-sitters in a college, I realised one day that some could not calculate the answer to a question as they did not know how many weeks in a year. School children are expected to know how many days in each month - here is a teacher's trick to remember; clench your fists and put your two hands together knuckles facing upwards. The left knuckle of your little finger is January, the dip February, the next knuckle March etc. All the knuckle months have 31 days, all the rest except February, 30. With the Olympics this year it is a great time to explain about the 365¼ days and leap years. So some ideas to address these problems? . The Olympics is a great opportunity to discuss minutes, seconds, tenths of a second, and hundredths of a second; many children also have no idea how long 10 seconds or a minute 'feels' like. . If planning a trip, involve your child in looking at and interpreting timetables. Get them to work out how long the journey will be. . When looking at a TV guide, ask them 'How long until' a particular program, or 'How long does a particular program last? Also cinema times can be examined. . Get them to write a 'timeline' of a typical school day, putting in analogue, digital and 24 hour clock times.