Telling time worksheet
Pick the step your child is on, from o'clock through to five-minute times. The child reads the two hands and writes the time on the line underneath. Need another sheet? New version keeps the same step and draws fresh times. Free, no account, no ads.
What the clocks show
The long hand points straight up, so only the hour is read. A sheet never goes past the step you pick.
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.
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.
What gets harder at each 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.
Quarter to is the next jump, because the answer names the hour the short hand is heading towards rather than the one it has passed. After that, five-minute times ask the child to read the long hand as a count of fives: pointing at the 4 means twenty minutes, not four. These sheets stop there, at five-minute times.
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. Half past five and half past six are left out for the same reason, and so are quarter past three and quarter to nine: the two hands end up almost touching, and a child cannot reliably tell which one is which. Every other time is in the mix.
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