Time - Start and end times - Planning

The Year 3 summer term curriculum introduces children to the concept of time, specifically focusing on calculating start and end times during the third week. In this interactive and practical lesson, various resources such as mini clocks, whiteboards with pens, worksheets, and a presentation are utilised to aid learning. The key vocabulary includes terms like 'time', 'start', 'end', 'minutes', 'hour', 'past', 'to', and '24-hour clock', with vocabulary cards and definitions available for reinforcement. The lesson starts with a recap of previous learning through a true/false question about journey times, prompting students to use reasoning to determine the longer journey.

Children engage in hands-on activities with mini clocks to practise finding start and end times, transitioning between analogue and digital formats to solidify their understanding. For example, they might calculate the end time of a show that started at 6pm and lasted 2 and a half hours, or determine what time a train left London if it arrived at Reading station at 6:15am after a 45-minute journey. Partner activities encourage collaborative problem-solving, and the use of number lines links back to prior work, enhancing their ability to solve time-related problems. Differentiated worksheets allow for independent learning, while reasoning questions help deepen understanding. The lesson concludes with a reflection on the skills used, such as addition, subtraction, comparing, and ordering, and a reminder of the strategies that were helpful. Depending on their level of understanding, children work towards different goals, from finding start and end times to the nearest minute to working with complex times that require conversion and multiplication.