Class 3 to 5 · 49 games

Time and units, explained with pictures

Reading a clock, and swapping between units like metres and centimetres.

In everyday life: Catching a bus at 3:45, a 2 km walk, a 500 g packet of flour.

The two clock hands do different jobs

The short hand tells the hour. The long hand tells the minutes, and each number it points to is five minutes, not one.

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Short hand past 3, long hand at 45

Metric units step by ten, a hundred or a thousand

100 cm in a metre, 1000 m in a kilometre, 1000 g in a kilogram. Going to a smaller unit means more of them, so the number gets bigger.

Time does not step by ten

There are 60 minutes in an hour, not 100. So 1 hour 30 minutes is 90 minutes, and 2:50 plus 20 minutes is 3:10, not 2:70.

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Ten to three
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20 minutes later: 3:10

A worked example

How many centimetres is 3.5 metres?

350 cm

Each metre is 100 cm, so 3 metres is 300, and half a metre is another 50.

Words to know

unit
What you are counting in — cm, m, kg, minutes.
elapsed time
How long it took from a start time to an end time.

In the games

You will read times off clock faces, work out how long something took, and convert between units.

Skills

  • Tell the time on a clock · Class 3
  • Elapsed time · Class 4
  • Length, weight and capacity in two units · Class 4
  • Convert metric units · Class 5
  • Maps and scale · Class 5

By class

Practise time and units in Tivumo

No download, no account for your child. Classes 3 to 12, more than 1,000 games.