Are your students ready to start telling time? This is such a fun and exciting skill, and these telling time kindergarten worksheets and activities will help them learn the concept of time in no time at all!
Let's be honest; telling time is a tricky concept! Although kids are used to doing things at different times of the day, finding the correct time down to the minute and making sense of analog clocks is a bit more challenging.
These days, our kids spend more time with digital clocks than ever before, so it takes specific, intentional practice to learn to tell time using the minute hand and the hour hand. Fortunately, I have a bunch of resources to simplify this process for young minds! Even better, they're interactive activities you can make once and use again and again.
(Keep scrolling for a special tool that will make your whole year way easier, too!)
Do kindergarteners need to know how to tell time?
Depending on the standards where you live, your kindergarten students may not be required to read analog clock faces and tell the time. In some parts of the world, these advanced skills will be covered in 1st Grade and 2nd Grade.
In Kindergarten, students usually learn about everyday relationships with time, like talking about the past, present, and future or discussing the order in which they do things. For example, students should be able to tell you what types of things they do in the morning or describe what they do when they get home from school.
Your students will also have prior knowledge about time to talk about our most common measurements of time, including years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. By the end of the year, they should be able to tell you the months of the year and the days of the week.
It would also be reasonable to have them identify which clocks are digital and which are analog, and Kindergarten students can often "read" a digital clock well enough to know when it's time for lunch or recess!
In Australia, Kindergarten students will learn to recognise 'o'clock' and may also be exposed to 'half past' on an analog clock. Of course, some students may learn these skills faster than others and be ready for a challenge, learning about 'quarter to' and 'quarter past' as well!
Telling Time Worksheets for Kindergarten & Beyond
When your students are ready to read analog times, these interactive activities will be perfect!
Before you start, grab my Parts of a Clock Free Activity to help your students understand the individual parts of an analog clock!
This hula hoop activity has always been effective for me and helps young learners grasp the concept quickly.
You can watch it in action here:
What's the Time? - O'Clock Time
Once your students understand how to read a clock face, they're ready for this interactive activity! This initial example focuses on telling time to whole hours, so it's the most accessible entryway into this topic.
There are digital times to match the analog clocks, so they just need to match the cards with the clocks. There are 6 pages for lots of extra practice!
Telling Time to the Half Hour
As your students get more comfortable with the little hand and long hand, start practising time to the half hour.
This is an easier concept for kids to latch onto as we often talk about half measurements (half a cookie, half a sandwich). This time is also easier to tell on an analog clock since the minute hand will always be on the 6 and the hour hand will always be halfway between two numbers.
Get the half past puzzles here.
Tip: One of the trickiest things about teaching students this essential skill is helping them understand that the hour hand moves between two numbers during an hour. They need significant physical practice seeing a clock sweep across a clock, and the more interactive you can make it, the better.
Try making a giant hula hoop clock or draw an enormous chalk clock to model walking around the circle. As you get halfway between two numbers, you'll know it's half past without even using the minute hand!
Teaching Quarter Past and Quarter to
Once students understand half past, introduce the quarter hours. Focus on all the different ways we describe these times, like saying "quarter past," "quarter to," "15 minutes after," and "15 minutes until," and show these different times using both types of clock. Then, practise this skill using the quarter past and quarter to manipulatives below!
Telling Time Matching Printables
Tip: Add digital times to your analog clock!
These colorful clock numbers will make it easier for young students to connect the digital clocks from their gadgets with these old-fashioned analog clocks.
Time Puzzles
These time-matching task cards are another great way to practise this crucial skill. Like before, students must match the digital time with the analog time. This time, they're putting two pieces of a puzzle together!
There are four levels to these interactive activities to help your students practice the appropriate skill only when they're ready for it!
Once your kids can match the times easily, mix the sets to make them more challenging. This is a fantastic way to consolidate their learning!
Get all of the time puzzles here:
More Time Telling Worksheets and Resources
Although these are the only printable activities for telling time on Mrs Learning Bee, there are even more activities on The Hive!
This revolutionary digital teaching platform has hundreds of resources embedded into it, making it easy to pull up evidence-based videos, apps, and activities at a moment's notice.
Time Duration Worksheets
Help your little ones compare lengths of time based on their own real-life experiences. This is a perfect Kindergarten worksheet and it's already differentiated, so you can use it right away!
Time to the Hour 5-Day Lesson Plan
As part of The Hive, you can get a free printable five day lesson plan to teach your kindergartens how to tell time to the hour! There are also lesson plans for teaching duration, days of the week, and over 30 other Kindergarten programs to cover math content for the entire year.
What Time of Day? Digital Slides
Help those young students make sense of the different times of the day with these colourful slides. There are also picture sorting cards to help them practice these new concepts independently.
Interactive Analog Clock
Model any given time by moving the clock's hands on your screen.
You can toggle digital time on or off, as well as whether or not you'd like to display the minute numbers, making this an excellent way to teach time and help your students double-check their accuracy!
Stopwatch & Timer
These tools are a great way to help your students keep track of time, but they're also a real-life way to show duration! No separate website or new window required.
Even better, there are so many wonderful interactive math activities to support your morning meetings or math centers, like:
- Digital base ten blocks (so much easier than drawing sticks and squares or using magnets!)
- Virtual abacus
- Ghost counters
- Customisable days of school tracker
- Hundreds square
- Rekenrek
- Number line (great for reinforcing the number line around the clock)
- Number flash ball
- and so many more!
And that's just the apps! There are even more digital slides, videos, and printable resources available only to members of The Hive. It's a game-changer!
