Purpose
This unit involves students in looking at the lengths of time various activities take and calculating how long is spent on these activities in a week.
Specific Learning Outcomes
- Estimate the time taken for daily activities in hours and minutes.
- Use advanced counting or partitioning strategies to solve problems involving minutes and hours.
- Check the reasonableness of answers obtained using a calculator.
Description of Mathematics
Two aspects of mathematics are explored in this unit on time:
- Investigations of the length of time taken for various activities, working in hours and minutes.
- Calculations involving hours and minutes. It is anticipated that ākonga could use repeated addition, skip counting, multiplication or division to solve these problems.
Opportunities for Adaptation and Differentiation
This unit can be differentiated by varying the scaffolding provided and altering the difficulty of the tasks to make the learning opportunities accessible to a range of learners to a range of learners. For example:
- using materials or draw diagrams to support their thinking as they solve problems involving numbers of minutes and hours.
- providing simplified tasks for ākonga to investigate, working with small numbers of minutes that add to less than an hour. For example, 2 minutes to brush your teeth (28 minutes total in a week), 5 minutes to make a sandwich for school lunch (25 minutes total in a week), or 3 minutes to pack your school bag (15 minutes total in a week)
- providing more complex tasks for ākonga to investigate that involve working with larger numbers of minutes, that add to more than an hour. For example, 30 minutes of homework each school day (2 ½ hours in a week), or 10 hours sleep each night (70 hours sleep in a week)
- using calculators to check the reasonableness of estimations.
The contexts in this unit can be adapted to recognise diversity and encourage engagement. For example, ask ākonga to share activities that happen regularly in their families, or activities that they regularly enjoy (for example, going to church, kapa haka practice, sports practice). Adapt the investigations to include these familiar and enjoyable activities.
Te reo Māori vocabulary terms such as wā (time), meneti (minute), and haora (hour) could be introduced in this unit and used throughout other mathematical learning.
Home Link
Dear parents and whānau,
In maths this week we are focusing on time and on the duration of activities.
This week your child will be timing how long various personal routines take to do. Your assistance and encouragement with the following task is appreciated. You are welcome to add some other activities to the bottom of this table.
Time yourself one day and write down how long it takes to:
Activity | Time taken |
Eat your breakfast | |
Brush your teeth | |
Get dressed | |
Travel to school | |
Home Run
This is a level 4 measurement activity from the Figure it Out series.
A PDF of the student activity is included.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close. Download PDF (3431 KB)
interpret timetables
This activity introduces students to a common timetable layout. By working through the exercise, they will confront the variations needed in laying out a transport timetable so that it solves timetabling problems, such as changes in demand levels over a typical day.
Before the students begin the activity, they could look at the first section, showing buses leaving Karori Park between 6.40 a.m. and 9.50 a.m., to make sure that they understand how to read the timetable.
Ask questions such as:
“What time does the bus that leaves Karori Park at 8.35 a.m. get to Wellington Hospital?”
“How long does the trip from Karori Park to the Kilbirnie shops take?”
“Is Courtenay Place closer to Karori Park than Lyall Bay? Use the timetable to help you decide.”
Ask the students to investigate the frequency of the buses and explain the variations
throughout the timetable. For example, the middle section of the timetable, with the 15 minute space between buses, is a different layout. Questions that may help include:
“What hours in the day apply to this section of the timetable?”
“Why are there only four times listed in this section for each stop?”
“What time does a bus that leaves Karori Park at 11.20 a.m. get to Wellington Hospital?”
“Why did the timetable designers choose to use this layout for the middle section of the day?”
The last section of the timetable reverts to the original format. Ask:
“What do the dashes at Lyall Bay for the last two trips of the day mean?”
When the students can confidently read the timetable, they can complete the chart. Ensure they allow 10 minutes after the end of the game for Geoffrey to get to the bus. After they have completed the table, they could investigate other timetables that they are likely to use, such as local bus or train timetables or the times of games in a sports tournament. As well as checking that they can read the timetables accurately, encourage them to think about the layout of the timetables. You could ask, “Why did the designer of the timetable use this particular layout?”
Answers to Activity
How long does it take?
This unit involves students in looking at the lengths of time various activities take and calculating how long is spent on these activities in a week.
Two aspects of mathematics are explored in this unit on time:
This unit can be differentiated by varying the scaffolding provided and altering the difficulty of the tasks to make the learning opportunities accessible to a range of learners to a range of learners. For example:
The contexts in this unit can be adapted to recognise diversity and encourage engagement. For example, ask ākonga to share activities that happen regularly in their families, or activities that they regularly enjoy (for example, going to church, kapa haka practice, sports practice). Adapt the investigations to include these familiar and enjoyable activities.
Te reo Māori vocabulary terms such as wā (time), meneti (minute), and haora (hour) could be introduced in this unit and used throughout other mathematical learning.
Getting Started
How could we work out what seven lots of 2 are all together?
How do you know 5 lots of 5 minutes is 25 minutes altogether?
How could you check?
If we know 2 lots of 5 are ten is it reasonable for 5 lots of 5 to be 8 which is less than that?
How long do you think you would spend brushing your teeth in a week? What did your group find out?
From our calculations which activity takes the most of our time over the course of a week? Which takes the least?
Exploring
How many minutes in an hour? In half an hour?
How did you work out how long she spends each day?
How could you check your calculations?
Is it reasonable to spend that long to brush your teeth? How long do you think it takes you?
Who takes the longest?
How much longer do they take?
How does this compare with how long you would take to do that?
Copymaster 5 can help in these comparisons.
Reflecting
Did you find the statement that was unreasonable? How?
What made you think it was the unreasonable one? How did you check?
Dear parents and whānau,
In maths this week we are focusing on time and on the duration of activities.
This week your child will be timing how long various personal routines take to do. Your assistance and encouragement with the following task is appreciated. You are welcome to add some other activities to the bottom of this table.
Time yourself one day and write down how long it takes to: