Telling time. It's one of the first things we start teaching kindergartners. I remember the model clock in my kindergarten class. It had a huge wooden face with big, red plastic hands and big black numbers.
The public schools are not teaching time on an analog clock, anymore. There are so many children who have difficulty with analog clocks that they just skip over it, since we have digital clocks that can do the job. But, analog clocks show so much more than time.
An analog clock shows the passage of time in a way that a digital clock cannot. A child learns to "feel" time when he sees that five minutes is a small amount and a half hour is a large amount of time.
Reading an analog clock requires using both the left and the right brains since it is read globally and spatially, as a child learns to divide it into quarters (right brain), while teaching counting skills in ones, fives and fifteens and math fundamentals in base 10, base 12 and base 60 (left brain).
Reading an analog clock gives a foundation for advanced mathematics. Clock reading makes the angles in geometry more familiar than they would be if they hadn't seen them before. Geography and angle measurements are based on clocks. Every degree in an angle (and on a globe) has 60 minutes. Every minute has 60 seconds. The earth rotates 360 degrees one time in 24 hours. When navigators were learning how to measure the rotation of the earth and degrees of longitude (to find out where they were), they used clocks.
Without an understanding of the analog clock, there are so many other things that a child will not be able to understand. While it is, in fact, more difficult to teach a child to read an analog clock, it will stretch him in ways beyond his kindergarten skills and literally show him a wider world.
