Several elementary teachers shared that elapsed time was the hardest topic to teach. Here is a scaffolded handout to help compute elapsed time. The elapsed time setting is presented with two clocks, starting and stopping time. Below is an image for one of the more advanced pages of the handout. Here is how the strategy works.
- The time is divided into minutes and hours.
- The students identify how may minutes are needed in the first clock to get to the next hour.
- Then they identify how many minutes are present in the second clock.
- Finally, students determine the change in the hours.
- I did not include a spot to place the total elapsed time as the focus is to identify how to break up the problem into parts.
The handout starts with a focus on identifying the minutes leading up to the the next whole hours and the minutes after the last whole hour. The task demand is increased incrementally with whole hours only, then only one or the other clock having minutes then both clocks having minutes.
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