Materials
Your eyes Crayons
Paper
Instructions
- Looks for clocks where you live. Look on the wall in the kitchen, next to a grown-up Sprout’s bed, on a computer, or on a phone.
- Draw each clock on a different-colored piece of paper, or with a different-colored Crayon.
- What do the clocks look like? Are they round or square? Are there numbers or dots? What do the number look like? Where are the hands pointing? Or does the clock just display numbers?
- Sort your drawings so that similar clocks are grouped together. How many different ways can you sort them?
More Ideas
Look for clocks outside of your home. Draw clocks you see at the library or the museum, or other places you visit during the day. How are they different from your clocks at home? How are they the same?
Look on a grown-up Sprout’s wrist for a small clock called a “watch.” How many people do you see wearing watches? Ask the grown-up Sprouts you know if you can draw their watches, too.
Why It’s So
Sometimes our bodies tell us when it is time to eat, sleep or even take a walk. But mostly we rely on a tool called a clock to help us do all the things we want and need to do during the day. As you discovered on your clock hunt, clocks show up in all sorts of places and may look different from one other, but they all tell us the time of day.
Analog clocks have numbers in a circle that go from 1 up to 12 and two “hands” that rotate around the circle. The small hand points to the hour, and the big hand points to the minutes. If the small hand is pointing at the 7 when you wake up in the morning, it is 7 o’clock. Digital clocks do not have hands and numbers in a circle. Digital clocks show numbers separated by two dots (4:00, for example). The number in front of the dots tells the hour (from 1 up to 12). The number after the dots tells the minutes, and goes from 1 up to 59. When a clock says 6:30, it is 6 o’clock plus 30 minutes.
Sometimes you can tell time just by watching things around you change. With an hourglass, you can watch sand slowly pour out of the top section to the bottom – when the top is completely empty of sand, an hour (or 60 minutes) has passed. Another way to measure time is to keep track of a tree’s shadow over the course of a day. Place a rock at the edge of a tree’s shadow after breakfast, by lunch time the rock will still be where you placed it, but the edge of the shadow has moved. Measuring the distance between the rock and the edge of the shadow is another way to tell time.
Information provided by Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Explore more at www.brooklynkids.org