Your Clock is a Teaching Assistant

As long as we have analog clocks on the wall, we’d better make use of those hands going around and around. In the big picture, going non-digital forces students to process an abstract idea in more visual and complex ways. On a smaller scale, though, the clock is a great tool for practicing rounding (to the nearest five minutes as in “it’s 25 minutes past the hour”), fractions (easily seeing the division of a unit into 12 or 60 pieces), using it as a metaphor for pie charts and, of course, learning to actually tell time.