ACARA v9 CONTENT DESCRIPTION “recognise and read the time on analog and digital clocks and use these to solve problems involving time, including the duration of activities”
The previous unit covered the units of time; this one reads them on a clock. Year 3 learns to read both an analog clock, with its two moving hands, and a digital clock, which shows the time in numbers, and to recognise that the two display the same moment. Reading the clock to the minute is the core skill, and it then becomes a tool: working out how long an activity lasts, or when something that starts now will finish. Telling the time is one of the most useful everyday skills a child gains, and it rests on the minute and hour relationships from the unit before.
Two hands, two jobs
An analog clock has a short hour hand and a long minute hand.
An analog clock has two hands that do different jobs. Reveal which is which.
The two hands
An analog clock works through two hands of different lengths doing different jobs. The short, thick hand is the hour hand, pointing roughly at the current hour; the long, thin hand is the minute hand, pointing at the minutes. Telling the two apart is the first thing to master, because reading the wrong hand gives the wrong time. The hour hand moves slowly, creeping between numbers across an hour, while the minute hand sweeps right around the face every hour. Knowing which hand is which turns a confusing dial into something readable.
O'clock and half past
The minute hand on 12 means o'clock; on 6 means half past.
What time does the clock show?
O’clock and half past
The easiest times to read are o’clock and half past. When the minute hand points straight up to 12, it is something o’clock, named by the hour hand — hand on 3 means 3 o’clock. When the minute hand points straight down to 6, it is half past, because the hand is halfway around. These landmark positions are the anchors of clock reading, learned first because they are unmistakable, and they give a child a firm footing before the in-between minutes. Most daily routines happen near these familiar times.
Counting the minutes
Each numeral the minute hand passes counts five minutes.
The minute hand points to 3. Count in fives to read the minutes.
Reading every minute
To read any time, not just the landmarks, the minute hand is read by counting in fives. Each numeral on the face stands for five minutes as the minute hand passes it: the 1 is five minutes, the 3 is fifteen, the 6 is thirty, the 9 is forty-five. Counting in fives is the five times table from the Algebra strand put to work, and it lets a child read the time to the minute rather than only to the half hour. This is the skill the descriptor means by reading the clock precisely, and it unlocks every time on the face.
Match the digital
An analog time and its digital form name the same moment.
Which digital time matches this clock face?
Analog and digital agree
A digital clock shows the same time a different way: the hour, then a colon, then the minutes as two digits, so quarter past seven reads 7:15 and five past nine reads 9:05. The minutes always take two digits, which is why five past is written 05, not 5. Matching an analog face to its digital form, and back, shows that the hands and the numbers describe the very same moment. Reading both kinds of clock, exactly as the descriptor requires, means a child can tell the time wherever they see it, on a wrist or a screen.
How long did it take?
The duration between two times is found by counting on from start to end.
An activity runs from 3:00 to 3:20. How long is that?
How long did it take?
Once a child can read clock times, those times become tools for solving problems, starting with duration: how long an activity lasts. Given a start and an end time on the clock, the duration is found by counting on from one to the other — from 3:00 to 3:20 is twenty minutes. This uses the reading skill together with the counting-on of the Number strand, and it answers a question children genuinely ask. Working out the duration of activities is named directly in the descriptor, and it turns clock reading from naming a moment into measuring a stretch of time.
When will it finish?
Adding a duration to a start time gives the finishing time.
It starts at 3:00 and lasts 30 minutes. When does it finish?
When will it finish?
The companion problem runs the other way: given a start time and how long something lasts, when does it finish? Adding the duration to the start time gives the answer — a 45-minute lesson beginning at 9:00 finishes at 9:45. This is addition applied to clock times, the natural partner to working out a duration, and together they cover the everyday time questions of Year 3. With the two hands, the landmark times, reading every minute, matching digital, finding durations and finding finish times all in hand, a child can read any clock and use it to solve real problems — and the Measurement strand turns next to angles and turns.
Quick self-check
1. The minute hand points to 12 and the hour hand to 3. The time is...
2. The minute hand points to 6. How many minutes past the hour is that?
3. How is "quarter past 4" shown on a digital clock?
4. A film starts at 3:00 and ends at 3:20. How long is it?