3 Tips for Teaching a Dyslexic Child to Tell the Time

Teaching a dyslexic child to tell the time is tricky. Even once they master this skill, understanding the concept of time and what they can accomplish in each number of minutes or hours doesn’t come easy.

I had the following conversation about time with my dyslexic son, Harry, yesterday.

Me–Don’t forget you have to be at Dave’s at 5 o’clock.

Harry–What’s the time now?

Me–It’s ten to five.

Harry–When will we be having dinner?

Me–6 o’clock.

Harry–Okay, I’m going now. Can I go mountain biking on my way back?

A mountain bike ride takes well over an hour. At fifteen, Harry still needs help to plan his time or else he tries to fit in too much or misses appointments altogether.

Tips For Teaching a Dyslexic Child to Tell the Time

1. Start with sequencing

Harry needed to work on his sequencing ability before I taught him to tell the time. The idea of ‘before’ and ‘after’ didn’t come naturally to him. He also struggled with knowing his left from his right. These sequencing difficulties are very common for children with dyslexia.

At six, Harry would get out of bed in the morning and ask, “What’s for dinner?” when he meant breakfast. He struggled to say the days of the week in the correct order, and he had no idea about the months of the year.

In my book, I mention that most of the useful tips I’ve picked up for helping Harry came from other parents. When Harry was seven, I met a mother in the school playground who told me her dyslexic son had improved his sequencing ability using resources from the Learning Staircase. I promptly went home and purchased a DVD from their website. Harry worked on the days and months activities, and his sequencing ability improved.

2. Teach the time in stages

In my post about memory, I mention the working memory funnel. If you try to teach the time concepts of a quarter-past, half-past and a quarter-to, before the child understands the idea of what an hour is, their memory funnel may block. Don’t be in a rush to teach too much at once. The trick is to go slowly. I recommend Sally Raymond’s excellent step-by-step breakdown on how to teach the time here.

Once Harry had grasped the concepts of ‘to’ and ‘past’, I bought him a watch which colour codes ‘past’ and ‘to’ on the face. https://www.easyreadtimeteacher.com/buy/easy-read/wrist-watch/.

However, Harry disliked wearing a watch. I suspect this was due to his mild sensory processing disorder. He is very sensitive to certain fabrics and I have to cut tags out of his clothes. Find out more about SPD here.

3. Have conversations about time throughout the day

Drop time into your everyday speech. Say things like, “It takes ten minutes to get to school,” and “We’ll have dinner in fifteen minutes.”

Play games of estimating how long it will take to get to places. For more fun with clocks and time, go to easypeasyandfun.com.

Other time-related topics

Analogue vs digital

A child with dyslexia may prefer to read a digital clock face. Harry does, but I felt it was essential for him to learn to read an analogue clock. Phones aren’t permitted in school examinations and an analogue clock may be the only timepiece in the hall.

I dislike digital clocks. My dyslexia comes with a side-order of mild dyscalculia (difficulty with numbers). Perhaps that is why I also hate using the 24-hour clock. Working with bus timetables, and the like, is my idea of hell.

Time Management

When Harry started school, we used a picture schedule on a whiteboard to help him get ready in the morning. The pictures were a breakfast bowl, a toothbrush, some clothes, his lunch box, and his school bag. He ticked off each image with a whiteboard marker as he got ready.

Harry can now tell the time, but from my opening paragraph, you’ll have gathered time management is still a work in progress. He’s a teenager and dislikes being told what to do. As much as possible, I let him plan his social life, but I am aware I need to offer him support when he’s underestimated how long activities and journey times will take.

Organisation

Keeping things in their correct place is a massive help to get things done on time. If Harry knows where his shoes and his coat are, it makes getting out of the house much more straightforward. Because Harry also has ADD being tidy isn’t easy for him. Disorganisation is one aspect of ADD. For more on ADD read this. For tips on helping a messy child read this.

Travel time

In researching dyslexia, I discovered struggling with being on time has a technical name. I always thought it was ‘being hopeless’, but in fact, it is ‘temporal-sequential disorganisation’ and is an aspect of executive functioning common in people with dyslexia.

My being habitually late drives my husband crazy. To me, on time means anywhere up to ten minutes past the agreed time. To him, it means arriving early. It’s taken me years not to leave the house at the time I am supposed to arrive. I’ve finally put in place a system of going fifteen minutes earlier than I expect the journey to take.

I’m working on teaching this concept to Harry. I encourage him to use the alarm function on his phone. He’s having some success, but there is still a long way to go. I can see I’ll be keeping my support role for a while. I can’t complain. After all, it took me many years to learn how to get to places on time. These days I’m fairly good at it, as long as I can avoid using the 24-hour clock timetable to plan my journey. If I must use one, it’s anyone’s guess when I’ll arrive.

How did you teach your dyslexic child to tell the time?

I taught my son to read and spell in 30 minutes a day. Here are my affilate links to the resources I used, All  About Spelling and All About Reading.

If your child also struggles to learn the multiplication tables, check out this blog post on how using stories will help them remember the facts.

Speechify is an app that can help dyslexic children as it reads online text. Here is my affiliate link.

References:

https://www.scholastic.com/parents/family-life/parent-child/teach-kids-to-manage-time.html

https://www.easyreadtimeteacher.com/app/uploads/2020/03/Downloadable-Lesson-Plan-How-to-tell-analogue-time.pdf

http://www.dyslexiahelp.co.uk/teaching-tips/telling-the-time/#:~:text=For%20dyslexic%20children%20who%20find,usefullness%20of%20reading%20the%20clock.