Time - Measuring time in seconds - Planning

In a Year 3 summer term lesson, students dive into the concept of measuring time in seconds and understanding its duration. The practical session is designed to give children a tangible sense of time through a variety of physical education activities. Resources such as stopwatches, cones, hoops, skipping ropes, and balls are utilised to create an interactive and engaging learning environment. The lesson's key vocabulary includes terms like 'time', 'compare', 'inequality', 'duration', 'longest', 'shortest', 'minutes', 'hour', 'past', and 'to', which are crucial for the children's understanding of the topic. Through hands-on activities, students are encouraged to make predictions and measure how long they take to perform different physical challenges, such as star jumps or hula hooping, fostering their ability to convert between minutes and seconds.

The lesson also incorporates reasoning challenges that require students to explain and justify their thinking, with sentence stems provided to support their answers. Differentiated worksheets offer independent activities tailored to varying levels of comprehension, from working towards understanding simple times to achieving greater depth in time conversion. Key questions prompt students to think about the tools needed for measuring time accurately and to consider different durations for tasks. The plenary session, 'Give me five', encourages self-reflection on what they have learned, the skills they have used, and ensures that key concepts, such as converting between seconds and minutes, are remembered. This structured approach ensures a comprehensive grasp of the topic, with a focus on practical application and critical thinking.