✕

Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What are analogue and digital?

Analogue and digital time
We explain what analogue and digital are and how and when children are taught to read clock faces and convert between analogue and digital times in primary school.

What are analogue and digital?

An analogue clock is a circular-faced clock with the numbers one to twelve around the outside and two hands, a shorter one to measure hours and a longer one to measure minutes.

A digital clock is a clock which simply shows numbers to denote the time. It is usually battery or electricity powered.
 

How do children learn to read analogue and digital clocks?

Children learn to tell the time in Key Stage 1 on an analogue clock.

It can take children a while to understand the concept of what each hand represents, so Year 1 teachers will start with teaching children that if the long hand is on the 12 and the short hand is on the 8, then it is 8 o'clock.

They will usually spend plenty of time getting children used to the 'o'clock' time, pointing to the clock at various times of day, so that children are aware of what happens at 9 o'clock, 11 o'clock, 1 o'clock, 3 o'clock etc.

Once children are clear on this, a teacher will move onto 'half past' times. Again, they will spend some time on this until children are confident.

Year 2 children need to be able to tell the time to five minutes, including quarter to/past.

 

In Year 3, children need to tell and write the time from an analogue clock, including using Roman numerals. They need to understand the 12-hour and 24-hour clock. Therefore at this point, they will start looking at digital time. They should, at this stage, realise that these two times are the same:

In Year 4, children need to read, write and convert the time between analogue and digital 12- and 24-hour clocks.

In Years 5 and 6, children need to solve problems involving converting between units of time