telling+the+time+4B

Thursday 18th of March( the little test) Topic: telling the time.

First of all, the teacher that is with me was not there. I was with a supplied teacher which had a very bad effect on the pupils. The lesson went on very well, I used a plastic clock, made up times and they had to read it in French. Like always some got it very quickly.

First I taught them o'clock. We practised it for 5 minutes and then I moved on on half past. Again we practised and they were able to make the difference between the two and to recognise them. What appeared to be a problem were the numbers, they had to count on their fingers before telling the time. I would have like more time to practise but it only remained 10 minutes and we had to do the little test.

That when things got terrible. I told them what they had to do: draw the arms of the clock in the correct clock. In fact, I numbered each clock from 1 to 20 and they had to draw the arms in the correct clock. I was saying: In clock numéro 4, il est 5h for instance. But it must have been to hard because, after each of my sentence, there was:" what, I did not get it, can you reapet, ". I was so upset because this class do that everytime, they do not even try to do the test because they are sure that they are going to fail. Even Emily, a pupil, was upset and asked her classmates to stop talking and tried to concentrate because it was not so hard.

Anyway, I managed to get to the end of the test and the result shows that 2 children got all wrong; 1 child made 9 mistakes; 1 child made 8 mistakes; 2 children made 7 mistakes; 1 child made 6 mistakes; 3 made 5 mistakes; 3 made 4 mistakes; 3 made 3 mistakes; 2 children made 2 mistakes; 5 children made 1 mistakes and 2 children made no mistakes. One child left because he felt sick and one went with him.

A lot of them made a confusion between the numbers 2 et 12. I think it proves that they still have a lot of difficulties with numbers. And maybe the curriculum is not so well done, they are too young to learn how to tell the time in french.

16 children got wrong: il est 11h30; 14 got wrong: il est 2h ( most of them wrote down: 12H) ; 13 children have mistaken il est 3H30; 12 children got wrong: 8H30; 10 children had mistaken 5h30; 9 children got wrong: il est 6h; 6 got wrong: il est 2H30; 5 got wrong 10H; 5 had mistaken 6H30 and 3 had mistaken il est 4h.

I cannot find an explanation to their mistakes, half past might be more difficult to learn than o'clock. First because it is longer and then maybe because we learnt it at the end of the lesson and we did not spend enough time on it. I guess that those who made a lot of mistakes do not know how to count, that was their problem.

Finally, little by little the best children reveal themselves. The same ones keep having the best result, no matter the subject.