Have students estimate how long it will take, in seconds, for a student to walk at a normal pace from one end of the classroom to another. Time one student as they walk across the room and compare the result with the students' estimates to teach the real length of a second.
Round the timed result of the classroom walk to the nearest second and have students calculate how many times their classmate could cross the room in a minute and an hour. Since there are 60 seconds in a minute, students should divide 60 by the number of seconds one crossing takes to get their answer. To solve for an hour, take the number of crossing per minute and multiply by 60.
Have students count how many hours are in a school day. Round to the nearest hour, or for an extra challenge, have them find the exact number of hours and minutes.
Create problems for students converting large units of time into smaller ones. For example, read the run time, in minutes, on the back of a DVD and ask students how long that is in hours. For an extra challenge, use a DVD boxed set of a television series. These generally have run times listed at upwards of 500 minutes; to solve the problem, students will have to divide the number of minutes by 60. The quotient will be the number of hours; the remainder will be the additional minutes not in full hours. For example, a film running 140 minutes is 2 hours and 20 minutes long.
Convert days into hours by dividing the number of days by 24. Use this to have students calculate how many hours are in a week, or how many hours they spend out of school over the weekend or during holidays.
Convert weeks into days by multiplying a given number of weeks by 7. Use this as a lesson earlier in the year by counting off how many weeks are in the school year. Since school only runs five days a week, for this specific lesson, have students multiply the number of weeks by 5 to find the number of school days. Subtract PA days and statutory holidays from the total.
Teach students this simple mnemonic device to remember how many days are in each month:
Thirty days has September,
April, June and November
All the rest have 31
Except February, which has 28
Or 29 in leap years
Teach students to convert time to military-standard 24-hour time. To do this, add 12 to any time past noon. For example, 1:00PM becomes 13:00 and 6:00PM becomes 18:00. Midnight is denoted as 0:00.
Add minutes and seconds by adding the minutes together, then adding the seconds. If the number of seconds is 60 or greater, subtract 60 from the total and add an additional minute. If the total is still greater than 60 seconds, repeat this process. Use this method to teach students to add times, calculated in minutes and seconds.