Quick Math Sheets

Telling time worksheet

Every clock shows a time on the hour or half hour. The child reads the two hands and writes the time on the line underneath. Pick your times and clock face, then print. Free, no account, no ads.

Times

Start with o'clock, where the long hand always points straight up. Half past is the harder step: the short hand sits between two numbers, not on one.

Clock face

Showing only 12, 3, 6 and 9 makes the child find the other hours by position. Use it once the full face is easy.

Orientation

Portrait prints nine clocks, landscape eight. Both use the same large dial.

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What Time Is It? (O'clock)

Look at each clock. Write the time it shows.

Quick Math Sheets

How it works

Each clock has a short thick hand and a long thin one. The short hand gives the hour, the long hand gives the minutes. On the o'clock sheet the long hand always points straight up at the 12, so the whole job is reading the short hand. Nothing on the page gives the answer away.

Why half past is the harder step

At half past, the short hand is no longer pointing at a number. At half past three it sits midway between the 3 and the 4, which is exactly where children go wrong: they see it nearer the 4 and read four o'clock. These sheets draw the short hand in its real position rather than parked on the hour, because a clock that cheats on that teaches the wrong thing.

Twelve o'clock is deliberately not on these sheets. At twelve the two hands sit on top of each other and there is nothing to read, so it is worth showing on a real clock rather than on paper.

Where it fits

Reading a clock needs confident numeral recognition first, so number tracing and count and color come before it. Alongside it, missing numbers and ordering numbers build the number sense the dial assumes. The grade 1 page gathers the rest of the resources for this age, and the full printables library has everything grouped by what your child is learning.

A simple routine

Do the first clock together, and always read the short hand first. Say which two numbers it is between, then pick the smaller one. Only then look at the long hand: pointing up means o'clock, pointing down means half past. Reading them in that order stops the most common mistake, which is answering with whichever number a hand happens to be near.