Throwback Thursday: Infant Timezone!

For two weeks in January, my classroom was in a very special 'timezone'. Taking on the idea of developing the children's sense of time and the language of time was a much wider topic than I had originally thought and provided many lessons worth of integration!
Here are some activities Senior Infants got up to during that...time... (excuse the pun!).

1) We sang some songs I downloaded off YouTube to teach the sequence and names of the days of the week and months of the year... only problem with these is that they were so catchy I found myself singing them to myself for the whole fortnight!
Days of the week:

Months of the Year:

Months of the Year Flashcards

We played a variety of games using these songs to help them to learn the correct order. One game involved lining up the months/days on the board and playing a game of Cluiche Kim (Which month is missing??). These are the documents I printed and cut out for each pair to sort:

Days of the Week Flashcards

2) We made a class outline of what we do on each day of the week to refer to each morning and also to end the questions of 'when are we doing art??' etc. I got their ideas at the end of each day to see what we should include and drew pictures beside each to aid comprehension of the chart. (If I were to do this again I would use the interactive board to create this with the class and then print it out for the wall. There are lots of lovely timetable templates available online these days!)

                                 

3) Rhymes: Hickory Dickory Dock: 

http://www.nursery-rhymes.org/images/rhymes_images/hickory-dickory-dock.jpg

We said the rhyme and talked about the parts that rhymed and the parts that didn't. We then composed another version as a class so that the whole rhyme... rhymed! 

Our rhyme:                                                    

                                           

                  Hickory, Dickory, Dock,

                 The mouse ran up the clock,

                  The clock struck one,

                  The mouse was done, 

                  The clock struck two,

                  The mouse bit you,

                  The clock struck three, 

                  The mouse ran up a tree.

4) We made clocks! They looked so good we turned them into a class mobile when we had finished the unit on time, by sticking them along a piece of string and hanging them from the ceiling. We made them from paper plates. I had stuck on address labels onto where the numbers should be to give them some guidance as to where they would write them. I added hands to the clocks and they used them to tell me various times throughout our maths lessons. They loved decorating them to look really colourful!

5) We played 'What Time Is It Mr Wolf?' in PE. See here for details as to how to play the game: http://www.littlesteps.eu/?/getting-active/running/What-time-is-it-Mr-Wolf/

6) We read the story 'My Great Grandpa' for history. I got this book from Amazon for next to nothing and the kids loved it! We talked about young people and old people and the concept of generations.

We used our bodies to learn about the family tree following our reading of the story. To symbolise older people at the top of the tree we stood on our toes, in the middle, we stood normally and for people at the bottom, we crouched low down as babies. We made family trees of the characters in the story, placing the older characters we drew at the top and the younger ones we drew at the bottom.                 

7) We listened and responded to the 'Syncopated Clock' in music class and also learned about Ta and ti-ti (the timing of crotchets and quavers), by telling them the story of Ta the deaf cat and her baby kittens (ti and ti). 

9) We also started timing ourselves in terms of how long it would take us to get ready to go home every afternoon. With my whiteboard marker, I would put a line on clock to mark when we started cleaning up and we would count the minutes that had passed when we had finished. This helped us get out quicker and also gives them an idea of the length of a minute or 5 minutes verses the length of an hour.