Telling Time With Cubes

I'm teaching time in a new and adventurous way this year.  This particular lesson all started with cubes.  I would have never thought cubes could lead to a better understanding of time, but stick with me and you'll see that it makes complete sense.  Each child had their own train of five.

After counting every child's set of 5 cubes, I traded them for a paper copy of five cubes which we then taped to a poster.  We labeled the number of cubes on the top and the number of trains on the bottom.  (I would have gladly used my whiteboard for simplicity sake, but my Smart board was totally in the way.)

Once we noticed several things about this interesting number line, we removed all the cubes past the 12th train and formed them into a circle like you see below.

Well, what do you know?  Looks an awful lot like a clock, eh? Of course, there was much discussion going on throughout this lesson.  I left out lots of information.  I just wanted to give you a gist of how it went and wet your appetite.  If you're interested in reading about the complete lesson, check out this post where you can find a link to an article that explains it in full.  It's good stuff!