Tick, Tock, Munch!

We introduced clocks this week. We started our week by going on a clock hunt around school to take pictures of all the clocks we could find. I'd hoped to actually use this adventure to find digital clocks but it is surprisingly difficult to find digital clocks in a school. We are all about analog, all the time. (We may be the only institution left that is, other than analogue clock manufacturers).

Although the clock hunt was fun we have a lot of clocks in school. It got old quickly ("LOOK! THERE IS ANOTHER CLOCK!!  ON THE WALL!!  IN THE CLASSROOM!!!") Luckily some awesome teachers let us take pictures of their phones and their watches.

We used the pictures to talk about what we notice in clocks and what the parts of a clock are. Today, after identifying the parts of the clock, we made edible clocks.

Tortillas for the face, raisins for the numbers, and celery for the hands. Sticky notes to show how the numbers go in order. 

I've seen this done with m&ms and Twizzlers instead of celery and raisins, but I was feeling a bit healthy when I went to the store this weekend. (And if you have peanut allergies sunflower butter works just as well).

By building the clock this way we were really able to focus on the language piece- in fact, we did this with the speech pathologist. We could work on concepts like circle, around, put on, spread, big and little. We spent a lot of time working on having the children request supplies from us, and worked on following a recipe (from Board Maker). We got a lot of language out of them in a very hands-on, fun way.

It was great, although none of the kids ate them. But when it came time that afternoon to identify the short hand and introduce telling time to the hour they had a much better concept of short hand thanks to comparing their celery sticks.