Infant timezone!

So for two weeks in January I was in a classroom 'timezone'. Taking on the idea of developing their sense of time and the language of time was a much wider topic than I had originally thought!
Here are some activities Senior Infants got up to during that...time... (excuse the pun!).

1) We sang some songs I nabbed off youtube to teach the sequence and names of the days of the week and months of the year... only problem with these is that they are so catchy I found myself singing them to myself for the whole fortnight!
Days of the week:

Months of the Year:

 So we played games with these songs like lining up the months/days and telling me which month/day is missing. 

          

2) We made a class outline of what we do on each day of the week to refer to each morning and also to end the questions of 'when are we doing art??' etc. I got their ideas at the end of each day of what we should include and drew pictures beside each to aid comprehension of the chart. 

                                 

3) Rhymes: Hickory Dickory Dock: 

                                 

 Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes:http://www.nursery-rhymes.org/images/rhymes_images/hickory-dickory-dock.jpg

We said the rhyme and talked about parts that rhymed and parts that didn't. We then composed a version as a class so that the whole rhyme... rhymed! 

Our rhyme:                                                       

                                           Hickory Dickory Dock,

                  The mouse ran up the clock,

                  The clock struck one,

                  The mouse was done, 

                  The clock struck two,

                  The mouse bit you,

                  The clock struck three, 

                  The mouse ran up a tree.

4) We made clocks! And they looked so good we turned them into a class mobile when we had finished the unit on time, by sticking them along a piece of string and hanging them from the ceiling. We made them from paper plates. I had stuck on address labels onto where the numbers would be to give them some guidance as to where they should write the numbers. I added hands to the clocks and they used them to tell me various times throughout our maths lessons. They loved decorating them to look really colourful!

5) We played 'What Time Is It Mr Wolf?' in PE. See here for details of how to play the game: http://www.littlesteps.eu/?/getting-active/running/What-time-is-it-Mr-Wolf/

6) Read the story: My Great Grandpa for history. Got this book from Amazon for an amazing price and it was worth every cent because the kids loved it! We talked about young people and old people and the concept of generations. We used our bodies to show the difference between old and young and where we might place people on the family tree (at the top: standing on our toes, in the middle or crouching low down for babies.) We made family trees of the characters in the story, placing the older characters we drew at the top and the younger ones we drew at the bottom. 

                        

Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SXAZFJ9NL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

7) Listened and responded to the 'Syncopated Clock' piece of music.

8) Learned about Ta and ti-ti (the timing of crotchets and quavers) in music, by telling them the story of Ta the deaf cat and her baby kittens (ti and ti). 

9) We also started timing ourselves in terms of how long it would take us to get ready to go home every afternoon. I would put a line on the time we started with a whiteboard marker and then we would count the minutes that had passed when we had finished. This helped us get out quicker and also informally instilled in them the length of a minute or 5 minutes verses the length of an hour which we also timed one day.

                            

                                                                 Image does not belong to me. It is used for educational purposes.