Telling Time!

These three books do an excellent job associating the hour with daily routines to help kids understand language used for time and learn to read a clock.

Busy Bunny Days: In the Town, On the Farm & At the Port by Britta Teckentrup is a visual delight of three scenes (town, farm, port) across seven different hours in the day. Each hour is marked clearly on a clock and associated with a textual cue to help kids recognize the time of day. Designed as a spotting book, it’s full of little details of everyday life and parallel story lines for numerous characters – there’s something to love in every spread! In fact, there’s so much to love that when my daughter picks it for story time I have her find “the most interesting thing” on each page and we follow the evolution of that detail over time – she always finds something new and it practically becomes a book of infinite stories! Best of all – because of the multiple settings, there’s something to relate to for kids of every background.

This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from around the World by Matt Lamothe follows kids from seven different countries through their typical day in fascinating detail – down to what they eat! Each section marks a temporal cue for a typical day such as meals, school, bedtime. The text has references to the hour, and we like to practice setting the time to match with a teaching clock. Beautiful, relatable, and informative, it is an excellent book for cultural awareness and emphasizes how much kids across the world have in common. Best of all, the format encourages interaction – my kids are eager to tell me “how I do it” and we discuss the similarities and differences with the profiled families. Bonus – the book closes with photographs of the actual families and a map marking their homes!

Time for a Hug by Phillis Gershator and Mim Green, illustrations by David Walker is an adorable and endearing celebration of hugs. Following a mommy and child bunny from waking to bedtime, it marks the passing of time with daily activity cues, textual references to the hour, and visual representation of the hour on a clock. It’s a great book for practicing setting a teaching clock to match the hour with each page. And each repetition of “What time is it? Time for a hug!” results in a story time full of snuggles! Best of all – the insertion of hugs throughout the day sends a message of steady, ever present love.