In the 2/3 and 3/4 classrooms we are looking at time and daily activities we perform at certain times of the day.
We have decided that it was important to be able to tell the time for many reasons: from knowing how long it takes to get somewhere, to getting to appointments on time or what time our favourite t.v show started – we came up with lots of reasons.
We have been surveying and graphing times others in our class get up for school and go to bed on a school night. Some people get up as early as 5am! We are hoping to find out if students of a similar age in Indonesia go to bed at around the same time as students in our classes.
We have been using the Futaba classroom edition to practice our times, numbers to 60 and daily activities (eg bangun, mandi, makan pagi etc)
With Futaba we have been able to create games at various challenge levels, suitable to the different abilities of students in the class. The games also allow you to choose a level – easy, medium and hard. Students liked the name “Futaba” and enjoyed the speed and sound of the games.
My only issue with the Futaba games was with students randomly hitting buttons to be first. Although this does mean that they are out for the round if they are incorrect, it doesn’t really encourage them think about the answer.
I tried to combat this when setting up a new game with numbers 1-20. I only put in two answer options, instead of four. However, this didn’t solve the problem, as Futaba adds in 2 extra random choices.
We put in a rule that you were not allowed to press your answer until the dial had stopped spinning. This helped a bit with random pressing, but some still needed more incentive to stop, look and think.
So: sometimes we have an umpire, who reads the answers aloud, before anyone can press and other times we move people back from the buttons – to try to get them to think before hitting. We also have more games, so students can be paired up with like abilities and encouraged to count on the screen or use their books as dictionaries.
We also use Jungle time ( in English, but students say in Indonesian) and moji jam pelatih apps to practice telling the time in Indonesian.