Tomorrow is the day all the public school kids here in the city start back to school. We will be starting tomorrow as well. My biggest concern is time management. There is so much to fit in... So many opportunities for time to tiptoe past while we chat at breakfast, or sneak away when I stoop to put a load of laundry in...
The kids have been asking for new watches for a while, so when we went to the Swatch store to get their great-grandma her birthday present we struck a bargain with them (note: she's a cool great-grandma -- she was the first person I knew who had a Swatch... a huge red one that she wore with her crisp white nursing uniform... the dress, the white hose, the weird little sort-of-hat...). The deal: if they agreed to sign a contract with us they could pick out a watch. The contract:
September 2012
By choosing and accepting the gift of a new watch, I, ________, agree to become a master timekeeper. I will continue studying and practicing with my clock
worksheets without whining, when asked to find out the time I will cheerfully
do so, when asked to keep track of time (i.e. during piano practice, or during
my free time) I will do so accurately.
Mostly, I promise to appreciate time and not waste it. I will try to think of fun or
interesting things to do when I have extra time, and even if I am doing
something that I find boring, or hard, or absolutely horrible, I will try to
find something positive about it so that the time is not wasted.
(The drawback of our anonymity is that you can't see their "fancy" handwriting that they used to sign the contracts. We will be working on cursive this year, but never will their signatures look as awesome as they do right now with flourishes and squiggles and tiny animals built in at every possible opportunity...)
So here's the first peek at our "curriculum" -- telling time. I get that the kids these days might not "need" the skill, as most will be retrieving time via their cell phones, or computer screens, or the data-lens surgically implanted onto their corneas, but nonetheless, we are going to master telling time, and have started to do so.
I've made a billion copies of sheets with blank clocks like this one, and created various exercises that fall into two categories:
1) I draw the hands and they write the time
a) straightforward -- they write where the hands are
b) there is an additional instruction like: "in ten minutes" -- and they have to add ten minutes to the time that is drawn and write the answer
2) I write the time and they draw the hands
a) 7:20
b) "a quarter after eight"
c) "ten to ten"
Obviously worksheets are a total snooze... but it's a good entry point to the other time-related activities that we will be doing, and it's a concrete way for me to see what they are retaining and able to apply. Their new watches have motivated them; they want to be able to tell time. When they are wearing their watches (The Boy only takes his off to shower; The Girl forgets to put hers on until she's reminded by something), I make an effort to refer to the time in different ways,"Your lesson is at 9:30 -- where will the minute hand be?" Also, they like that it helps them be helpful -- when I say, "I wish I knew what time it was..." they are excited to supply the answer.
We will be using time keeping for the first few days to to get our brains tuned back into math. It has addition and subtraction already built in ("What time will it be in twenty minutes?" or "What time did Dad call -- it was ten minutes ago?"); counting by fives is utilized; some simple fundamentals of circles are studied (I won't go quite so far as to call it geometry, but talking about "exactly across the circle is 30 minutes" is a start).
The thing that I like most about time telling is that it's kind of ambiguous. Often math gets this reputation for being more about exactness and less about critical thinking. But the best mathematicians are creative. I never made it to high-level math, but I did read A Beautiful Mind, and I was stunned to realize that math is so imagination-based... Telling time reminds us that at every level of math there is some finesse required. One must keep his/her thinking cap on because that hour hand is not always pointing exactly on the number, and the words that relate don't always match up (i.e. "a quarter to eight" does NOT mean that the hour hand is on the eight yet... tricky, tricky...).
It's time, it's time... These last few days have been overcast and dark... it's made me feel like summer is truly over. The doldrums have been multiplying like bunnies because we haven't ventured out much since rain has felt imminent. Last night when I asked the children what they wanted to do today -- their last day before school starts -- we laughed because most of what we usually cram in at the end will actually be a part of school this year. So they settled on "watching movies until our eyes fall out of our heads" since there won't be much movie-watching once school starts... tomorrow we start (with or without eyeballs).
