Summary
Get ready for pizza time! This engaging A1 lesson introduces the fundamentals of telling time in English. Learners will discover how a clock works, including the hour and minute hands, and learn essential phrases like o'clock, half past, quarter past, and quarter to. The lesson guides students through counting minutes using "past" and "to" and provides ample practice through video segments, interactive exercises, and games, all while keeping a fun pizza theme. By the end, students will confidently tell time and discuss daily routines.
Activities
Students start by discussing their daily schedules and experiences with telling time and pizza, activating prior knowledge and setting a relaxed tone for the lesson.
Learners will familiarize themselves with key time-related words like clock, hands, hour, minutes, o'clock, past, half, and quarter by completing sentences in a fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
Through a video segment, students will learn about the different hands of a clock and what they represent, focusing on identifying hours and minutes, and understanding the term o'clock.
This activity focuses on common time phrases such as quarter past, half past, and quarter to, using video explanations and sentence completion tasks to reinforce understanding.
Students watch a video to learn how to count minutes in fives, distinguishing between "past" the hour and "to" the next hour, followed by pattern completion and true/false questions.
Learners will solidify their understanding by matching digital clock times (e.g., 3:00, 8:15) with their corresponding spoken English forms (e.g., "Three o'clock," "Quarter past eight").
This section explains and provides practice for grammatical structures used to ask for and state the time, such as "What time is it?" and "It's half past three."
Students engage in a fun activity where they draw hands on a "pizza clock" based on times given by the teacher and then write down various times in numerical format.
Learners apply their new time-telling skills by completing sentences about their own daily activities, connecting language learning to personal experience.
A multiple-choice quiz allows students to test their comprehension of concepts like half past, quarter to, and identifying what clock hands signify.
In the "Clock master challenge," students work in pairs, taking turns to say a time for their partner to write down numerically, promoting interactive practice and peer checking.
After watching a video summary, students recall key time-telling rules and then create a short story about their day, incorporating various time expressions learned.
Vocabulary focus
This lesson introduces essential vocabulary for telling time, including terms like clock, hands (little hand, big hand), hour, minutes, time, o'clock. Students will also learn expressions for specific points in time such as half past, quarter past, and quarter to, and understand how to use past for minutes after the hour and to for minutes before the next hour.
Grammar focus
The primary grammar focus is on constructing sentences to ask for and tell the time. This includes mastering the question "What time is it?" (or "What's the time?") and the common response structure "It's [time]," such as "It's five o'clock" or "It's ten past three." The lesson also reinforces the correct usage of prepositions past and to when describing minutes (e.g., "twenty past six," "ten to seven").
