Clocks, coins and kitchen scales: the maths that lives at home

The short version

Telling the time on a round clock, and handling real coins, are both on the curriculum — and both have almost disappeared from daily life.
Your kitchen is better equipment than anything you can buy.
Ten seconds of maths, often, beats a session at the table.

Why is this its own guide?

Because there is a group of things schools teach that children used to pick up at home without anyone trying, and now do not.

Time, money and measuring are the clearest examples. A child in 1995 saw a round clock every day, held coins every week and watched someone weigh flour. A child now sees a phone showing 16:42, watches a card tap a machine, and eats things that came out of a packet.

Schools still teach it, because it is still on the curriculum. But children arrive with much less of a head start than teachers expect. That gap is easy to close at home, and it costs almost nothing.

Telling the time

Digital time is easy. Round clocks are hard, and they are hard for a real reason: a clock face makes you do two different things at once. The little hand counts in ones. The big hand counts in fives. Nothing else in a child's life works like that.

Get a clock they can turn. A teaching clock with hands you can move by hand is the single most useful thing on this page. Being able to move the hands and see what happens beats any explanation.

Do it in this order. O'clock. Half past. Quarter past and quarter to. Then five-minute steps. Then "twenty-three minutes past", which is genuinely hard and can wait.

Ask about the future, not the present. "What time is it?" is a quiz. "We're leaving in twenty minutes — what will the clock say?" is a real question with a real reason to answer it.

Put a round clock somewhere they look. The kitchen. Next to the television. If the only clock in the house is on an oven, they will never practise.

Money

The problem here is simple. Children barely see cash any more, and coins are how children first understand that things can be swapped and combined.

Get some real coins. Not much — a jar of change is enough, and it costs nothing. Real coins are better than plastic ones because they are the right size and weight, and because children take them more seriously. If you genuinely have no cash in the house, a play set will do the job.

Play shop. Price things ridiculously. Let them be the shopkeeper, because working out the change is much harder than paying, and that is the bit worth practising.

Give them the actual money sometimes. Let them pay in a shop, count it out, and take the change. It is slow. Do it when you are not in a hurry.

Ask "how else could you make 50p?" Multiple answers is the whole point. It is the same idea as number bonds, but you can hold it.

Weighing and measuring

You already own the equipment. It is in your kitchen.

Bake something. Almost everything schools teach about measuring is in a recipe: grams, kilograms, millilitres, litres, reading a scale, doubling a quantity, and what happens if you get it wrong.

Let your child do the weighing. Let them read the number off the scales themselves. If the recipe says 250g and they put in 400g, let that happen once — a cake that goes wrong teaches more than a cake that goes right.

Measure other things too. How tall is the door? How long is the sofa? Is the table wider than the sofa is long? Get a tape measure and let them loose.

Say the units out loud. Children get muddled between grams and kilograms because they mostly see them written. Hearing "two hundred and fifty grams" while holding 250g of flour joins the two things up.

Fractions, while you are there

Fractions frighten parents more than they frighten children, and food is the easiest way in.

Cut the toast in half. Now in half again. How many quarters in a half?
Share nine grapes between three people. Now share ten.
Half of the 12 chips is how many? A quarter?

The thing children need first is not the notation. It is the idea that a fraction is an amount of something. Half of a big pizza is more than half of a small one. That surprises children, and it is worth talking about.

The ten-second rule

You do not need a maths session. Sessions are hard to keep up and easy to resent.

What works is ten seconds, often:

"We need to leave in a quarter of an hour. What time is that?"
"That's £2.40. What's the change from a fiver?"
"How many grams in half a kilo?"
"Is this jug more or less than half full?"

Ask, get an answer, move on. No marking, no correcting at length. If they get it wrong, say the right answer cheerfully and carry on.

Our games for this

Three of ours cover exactly this ground, and they are free:

Clockwork Crumb — what the clock says, and what it will say later on. That second half is the bit most practice skips.
Change Please — coins, totals and change, in pounds and pence.
Crumb Shares — fractions of a number. Halves and quarters first, then the rest.

They are practice, not teaching. The clock on your wall and the change in your pocket are doing the real work.

Where this comes from

The national curriculum programmes of study for mathematics at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 set out what is taught about time, money, measurement and fractions, and when.

⚠️ The suggestions on this page are ours. The curriculum says what children are taught; it does not tell parents how to help, and we would rather be clear about which half is which.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

About us

And who we are: CrumbJar is a British puzzle-games studio. We make daily word and number games that children and adults play on a screen, and the games are free. So we have an interest in you thinking well of screens, and an interest in you buying things through our links. We would rather you knew that than found out.