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Talking Child Alarm Clock - a Great Help to Learn How to Tell Time

Author: H. Y. Wong

Teaching toddlers and small children to tell time is not an easy task. There are many hurdles to overcome. First you will need to teach them the concepts of hours, minutes and seconds and associate these concepts with the clock hand, minute hand and second hand found on an analogue clock.

It is relatively easy to teach them to read whole hours like one o'clock or two o'clock. All that is required is that the hour hand points exactly at positions 1 or 2 on the clock face. It becomes considerably trickier to teach them to read time including minutes such as twenty past one. You are going to have a hard time explaining why the minute hand pointing at position 4 corresponds to 20 minutes (or why position 5 corresponds to 25 minutes). Once they have successfully learned to read the minute hand, learning to read the second hand becomes much easier.

Reading is however different from understanding. You will have to teach them why the various clock hands move the way they do. You should let them know that it takes one complete revolution of the second hand (i.e. 60 seconds) to advance time by one minute. Similarly they should also learn that it takes one complete revolution of the minute hand (i.e. 60 minutes) to advance time by one hour.

That is not the end of it. Modern clocks are mostly digital and so children should learn to associate analogue and digital readings. Furthermore it is becoming quite common to see 24 hour clock in operation. Now you have the added problem of explaining why 17:00 is 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

From an adult's point of view, telling time is just so obvious and simple. But if you start thinking from a child 's perspective, you will soon see that it really is not that easy. It can take a long time for a child to grasp the concepts.

Fortunately there are some special clocks designed to make learning to tell time easier and a lot more fun. One of them is Teach Me Time! talking child alarm clock from American Innovative. It is suitable for very young toddlers all the way up to older children.

For the very young, the child alarm clock glows soft yellow at bed time and turns green color at wake up time. This way a baby learns to associate these 2 important time events with 2 different colors. For older children, the clock comes with an interactive talking time teaching game with 5 levels of progress levels. This means that children learn to tell time gradually, one little step at a time. Remember that children learn much quicker when it is in the form of a game. So this child alarm clock will hopefully make it easier for children to learn the concepts of time.