Children soon learn to associate time with their daily routine. From an early age, phrases such as 'it's 6 o'clock, bath time', are widely used.
Children are also presented with visual images in the form of wrist watches, alarm clocks and microwave timers.
One way to help children understand the importance of time is to engage them in an art activity where they can make a clock out of a paper plate.
The paper plate represents a clock face with numbers written around the edge. Cardboard fingers or thin plastic, such as the sides of a washed margarine tub, are used for the hands, positioned with a blunt, taped paper fastener.
Alternatively, show children how to type decorative coloured numbers in a word processor. This will not only help number recognition but also enable children to experience how to change font, size, style and colour. It will also encourage precision mouse skills.
First you need to prepare a word processing template which has a reasonably large font size - the default size is usually too small for young children to notice and highlight text. Open a new word processing document, adjust the size of the font to about a 26 point and save the blank document as a template - click File- Save As and choose document template from the choices available from the Save as Type options. This will stop children saving over the original file.
Children can use the template to type the numbers 1 to 12, pressing the Enter key twice between each number to create line spaces. Next, show them how to highlight or select a number.
Highlighting can be achieved in many ways. The most common method is to position the mouse before the number/text, click the left mouse button, drag to the end and let go. Alternatively double-clicking just to the left or on top of a number or word will highlight it. Once a number has been highlighted, show children how to change its font, colour, size and style.
Encourage them to choose different settings for each number. Print in colour, cut out and stick around on the paper plate to produce a clock face.
The activity could be extended using art software to draw a sun and moon to represent day and night, or other images to symbolise daily routines such as getting up, having lunch, brushing teeth.
