My daughters learned to read a clock by age six. It’s a good way to teach them numbers and how they divide into units.
Clocks are still sold at Walmart. Right beside the digital ones. Parents (that don’t have one) need to hang one on the wall. Explain how it works. Ask their kids “what time is it?” several times a day, for a week. They’ll carry that knowledge the rest of their life. Otherwise, I guess they’ll have to incorporate it into 2nd grade classes.
It does take awhile to learn to round up or down. It’s 10 till 6 not 5:50. People look at you strangely for saying 5:55. Digital clocks are annoying because they display it that way.
I don’t know why, but I found it very difficult to learn to tell time as a kid, even though I did very well in arithmetic and reasoning skills. Something about remembering which hand did what was very confusing and frustrating to me. Now I wear an analogue watch every day, but it still sometimes takes me a second or two to look at it and figure out what it says; it’s not automatic.
Anyway, this story reminded me that even when I was a kid in the 1980s, clock-reading seemed to be rapidly de-emphasized at school. I guess everyone thought we would all be looking at digital clocks all the time in the future.
This is really not necessary at all. Analog clocks are mostly decorative now (either as home decor or as jewelry). It’s not bad to know how to read one, but it’s not something vital either.
As someone who grew up in the digital clock era, I feel exactly the opposite. I can read an analog clock, but it’s not my native “language” for time.
Kids these days can’t even tell both time and direction with the sun and a stick. It is not good enough that they can tell time with typical clocks, i.e. digital clocks. Harrumph!
(Seriously, the title of the news article and the title of the thread are misleading by equating clocks with dial clocks rather than digital clocks. If you handed the kids digital clocks, would they be able to tell the time? The news article and thread titles imply “no”, which I expect would be far from correct.)
Analog clocks are easier to read than digital clocks. At 5:57, someone reading from the former will say “6 o’clock” while many reading from the latter will say “5 o’clock.” :smack:
… Or maybe my old-fogeyness is showing. Language evolves and maybe “5 o’clock” no longer means “about 5:00” but “5:59 or earlier.” :eek:
Helps with multiplication, too. Knowing how many seconds are left could also be important. Good time-waster during boring classes when I was in school. An invaluable skill when attending boring meetings at work as an adult.
By age 5 or so, I knew how to tell time to the minute, reading both hands…(.ie. when the big hand points to one number and the little hand to another.)
But then somebody told me about the second hand. And I clearly remember saying that they were wrong–it’s not the second hand, it’s the third .
