Learning to tell the time can be quite a difficult task for youngsters. It is of course one of the most important skills that they can master, as virtually everything that we do as human beings relates to the time of day. It is not too much of a stretch to say that we cannot function unless we get a solid grasp on this task! As a mother, this can become just another thing to worry about or we can turn it into an adventure of some kind for our children and have some fun with it ourselves at the same time.

There are many products designed specifically for children and you can buy some very visually stimulating clocks to hang on the wall of a room. These baby accessories are designed with the young child in mind, to encourage interaction and interest as they learn to tell the time. Try to place the clock in a prominent place amidst the nursery decoration, and refer to it often.

Spend a little bit of time every day for some weeks at this particular job and you should find that you will be successful. You do need to be a little bit regimented, as most of learning is in the repetition, of course.

First thing that you should do is to explain the hands - that the short hand relates to hours and the long hand relates to minutes. Explain that each time the long hand goes around the face completely this represents the passage of one hour. When this minute hand goes full-circle, the other hand will move to the next number.

Show the child what happens when you move the long hand around in a complete circle and the short hand moving to the next number. Have your child physically do this and practice this for a while. Do this, and this alone for several days till you feel that your child has really got the grasp of it before moving on to something else. Try and make this a fun activity - for example, the clock may have cartoon characters next to each number and you can use these characters to underline your story.

As you move on, you can teach them about half hours, five minute intervals and then move on to seconds. Please don't try and be too technical about all this and think that you should get into the deep definitions of time itself, as most likely we cannot explain this adequately to ourselves!

You might also want to incorporate some games into the process. Gather some children together and stand them in a circle and get one of them to tell the others to move into a position to represent a certain time as it would appear on the clock. You can get a large sheet of paper and draw a circle. Get the little ones to draw a particular time on the clock using cutouts for the long hand and the short hand.

You will be surprised that, right around the time they begin to graduate from their nursery bedding, they will start to pick it up pretty quickly and will soon have mastered one of our key fundamentals.

Bethany Bien loves being a mom; decorating nurseries and offering other moms advice and ideas on baby nursery decoration. Since you'll be spending a lot of time in the nursery, it's worth while to make it as safe, cozy and well decorated as possible. You can view her entire selection of fun stuff for your baby at=> http://www.BethanyBaby.com