Second Graders Learning Time, Fractions and Money
Why is time important to learn? Try asking your child this question. Some of t
he responses students shared included:
- “Well, if I was the flower girl at a wedding, I would need to know what time to get there!”
- “What if I overslept until 9:00 – I’d be late to school!”
- “On the weekends when I go to my games, I sometimes get there late so I don’t get to start.”
Students are exposed to digital clocks more than analog clocks like the one to the right. Digital clocks are on our devices, in our cars, on our Fitbits/smart watches, microwaves on our stereo consoles… making telling time unusually difficult. Several concepts are involved. Students must be familiar with a clock face, number orientation, the function of clock hands, and possess the ability to add and subtract hours and minutes. It is common for students to confuse the hour and minute hand and really difficult to understand that as the minute hand moves, so does the hour hand.
It is common for a second grader to read 1:55 as 2:55 since the hour hand is almost directly on the two.
Students will need to read time periodically on an analog clock, so having your child continue practicing these skills when life situations present themselves will help telling time easier. Our objectives included: telling time to the 5 minutes, calculating elapsed time, such as if the minute hand moves from the 3 to the 7, how many minutes have gone by, the difference between midnight and noon and and its relationship to A.M. and P.M.
Having taught fractions before our time unit, helped children understand what quarter to the hour and quarter after the hour meant along with half past the hour.
Students are now moving into a study of money. Along with the difficulties of children not really having a lot of experience paying with coins (versus an adult’s credit card or online purchases), most of the class is initially challenged with telling coins apart – the face of the nickel and quarter look very similar and both are the largest coins out of the penny, dime, nickel and quarter. Our study began yesterday with a magnifying glass and the bag of coins your child brought from home. They analyzed all the details of each coin including the edges – some coins are ridged and some are smooth. Students became experts when identifying coins with their eyes closed!
Counting money involves counting on and ski
p counting by 5s, 10s and 25s. To count coins, children need to understand how to sort the coins to make counting easiest. They need to sort them by starting with the coin of highest value and then the coin of next-highest value, continuing until all coins have been sorted into groups. Once children have grouped the coins, they then can skip count to find the amounts. They quickly learn that starting with a penny when calculating a group of coins, makes counting much more difficult. Try pulling a handful of coins for your child to sort and count when opportunities arise in your life. While the digital world will make coins counting obsolete one day, it won’t be next week!
Fun Fact: Did you know that it costs 1.67 cents to make a penny? What? Really?
Further down the road… 
