How To Introduce Clocks to 3 Years Old

Vito has been playing with Mavi’s learning clock and pretending that he’s able to tell the time (he always says 8' o’clock), so I decided that it’s about time that I should introduce this very important tool in telling time. I remember doing this activity with Mavi back in 2012. In this post, you will see how Mavi and I worked from creating a paper plate clock to matching analog clock with its digital label.

Making a Clock

Even if we already have a learning clock for Vito, we still created another one, just so he can have a hands-on experience on the different parts of a clock. Our homemade clock is made-up of cardboard and numbers from our Hape Number Puzzle.


We first talked about the clock, and made him describe it. So he mentioned that there were numbers 1 to 12, and that there were arrows.  Afterwhich I told him that we will also do the same to our homemade clock, and the first thing I asked him to do is to place the numbers in our clock as seen in the learning clock.


I just stand aside watching him do the work (while taking pictures LOL), and observed how he work. He would match the numbers in the learning clock first before placing them in our homemade clock.


When he placed all the numbers in the clock, I introduced the “arrows” and called them hands: long hand and short hand. We placed them in the clock and added a jumbo pin so we can manipulate them.



For awhile, I let him play around with the clock, he enjoyed rotating the hands!



So this is how our clock turned out. We placed it in a cork board so we can pin the hands and play with it. With the face of the clock in the board, I can let Vito assemble the numbers from time to time so he’s familiarized with the set-up of the numbers in the clock.


This was Mavi’s version of the clock in 2012.

Introducing the 3 Part Cards (Hour)

** I have a free printable version of this, which I created back in 2015 (hours only and with no border), you can download it for free here, Montessori Inspired Clock and Time Activities (with FREE Cards).

We tried working on the clock 3 part cards (hour), using our bordered clock material. I made the cards in 2015 and was not able to use it again. I presented a few cards to see if he’s capable of absorbing the concept (just to test the water!). He ended up matching only a few cards though, because he was interested into something else…


…and that’s copying the cards to his learning clock.  This means, he wanted to configure his clock to the time shown in each control card.


This was Mavi’s nomenclature cards in 2012. I should have used the digital label instead of the analog label, this was more easier to match.


Everytime he finished configuring the card, he would exclaim “I did it!” and I would insert, “The clock says it is 1 o’clock because the long hand points to 12 and the short hand points to 1”. He enjoyed telling the time after a few cards, so I guess after this introductory activities he’s ready to tell time.

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