If You Give A Student a Watch...They Will Ask you How To use It!
The outcomes for Gr. 3 in Alberta say that:
It is expected that students will relate the passage of time to common activities using nonstandard and standard units.
The students will relate the number of seconds to a minute, the number of minutes to an hour and the number of days to a month in a problem-solving context.
We read, A second is a Hiccup by Hazel Hutchins and Kady MacDonald Denton and we talked about all of the things that would take a second like a blink, and the things that tooka minute.
(Joanne the Good-bye Song takes one minute to sing.)
But we had a problem the students were not comfortable telling time on the analog clock that we have in our classroom.
So a student says, “Why is it 5 minutes after if there is a 1 there?”
The answer I have is that you have to know the secrets of the clock.
This is what happened next.
Our desks turned into a clock face.
Each student has a number from the clock on the front of their desk. But some of the numbers have 2 rows because I have 20 students.
Behind the number that you would see on the analog clock there is another piece of paper with their secret agent name and number on it.
1=05
2=10
3=15 ….
Each student dressed up like a secret agent. And we glued their secret agent picture to the number on the back piece of paper.
The second row is worried about what they are called.
They are 7= 007, 8= 008, NO PROBLEM!
We are all excited about being secret time agents and a student says we are the CIA and I ask why?
Another student says that’s easy!
C= Clocks
I = In
A= Action
ABSOLUTELY!! We are the CIA, Clocks in Action.
You know this means that you need CIA ID and badges.
You can make your badges at, Big Huge Labs
Badge Maker http://www.bighugelabs.com/badge.php cut them out put them on their desks or wear them proudly.
(Some discussion about internet safety may be needed; we did not use our full birthdates.)
If you take them with a green background you can cut the background off in Notebook 10 and place your students anywhere they want to go.
When you click on the green it will go pink and you can copy the picture and paste it into whatever setting they desire. I choose the pictures from Flickr in Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
but you can decide where you want them to go. I put them into a Notebook 10 file in our student common file.
ICT outcomes are there like crazy!!
They will be able to manipulate Notebook 10 before you know it. CUT PASTE
P.3 students will communicate through multimedia access images cut and paste.
Now to see if we know what time it is. The 2 students sitting in the middle
have now become Dr. Hour Glass (The hour hand) and Evil Mad Minute
(The minute hand) They get to pick 10 times and the students have to write down the time. If you don’t know the Secret agent name get up and look under their number.
It will tell you their secret agent number.
Yes!!
We all get it.
Of course you know that in gym that day we had to play, What Time is It Dr. Hour Glass?
In Tumble Books http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/home_tumblebooks.asp
there is a wonderful story IQ It’s Time . There are also some activity sheets that go with the story. 
Assessment: Clocks, and Assessment Tools
Handwriting for kids has a wonderful site that allows me to print the formative evaluation that I need. It also has a wonderful interactive worksheet on line that that students can practice on.
As with the famous book, If you give a Mouse a Cookie we can get back to our outcomes of relating the passage of time because they now understand how the analogue clock is read.
