One night, Little J hears the nocturnal Barking Owl and becomes fascinated by how the owl stays awake at night. In the morning, he is woken by the carolling of magpies and on the way to school, he is swooped by Maggie, the magpie. Miss Chen teaches the class about nocturnal animals.

Engage - Investigate number sequences, initially those increasing and decreasing by twos, threes, fives and tens from any starting point, then moving to other sequences

Theme - TIME

Revisit Little J & Big Cuz, Episode 13 ‘Night Owl and Morning Maggie’, and draw students’ attention to the time the Barking Owl was heard, and Little J’s attempt to stay awake like a nocturnal owl. Have students predict the time of year when this episode takes place.

Introduce the term ‘calendar’ to the class and ask students to explain what they think it is. Display different types of calendars for students to see and explore, e.g. magnetised calendars people put on a refrigerator, a diary calendar, a picture calendar, a Google calendar, etc.

Have students pose and respond to questions about what is the purpose of the calendar, who uses a calendar, how is the calendar constructed, why people need a calendar, etc. Divide students into smaller groups and provide a sample calendar per group. Have students discuss the questions posed above, and possible responses to them.

Ask students to find the shortest month, the longest month, the month when they were born, a month where the first day is a Sunday, a month where the last day is a Friday. Have students notice the sequence of days; does one calendar organise the days starting from Sunday or Monday, and has every week got the same number of days, etc.

Have students explore different cultural calendars to compare similarities and differences. Suggested resources:

• Calendars, clocks and culture
• History of the calendar
• World’s oldest calendar found in Scotland

Have students predict the commonalities of all calendars: the movement of the earth around the sun, and the measurement of the time it takes to complete the orbit.

Deconstruct the properties of a calendar into Year/s, Months, Weeks, Days; and deconstruct a day into hours, minutes, seconds. Have students suggest the relationships between each property via the chart (below). Ask students to examine the chart and respond to questions, such as:

• Which are the smallest, and largest, units of time?
• How many seconds in a year?

The focus here is about the relationship of the time units, not the detail of the numbers.

	Year	Month/s	Week/s	Day/s	Hour/s	Minute/s	Second/s
Year	1	12	52	365	8,760	525,600	31,536,000
Month/s	12	1	4.3	28–31	722.4	43,344	2,600,604
Week/s	52	4.3	1	7	168	10,080	604,800
Day/s	365	28-31	7	1	24	1440	86,400
Hour/s	8,760	722.4	168	24	1	60	360
Minute/s	525,600	43,344	10,080	1440	60	1	60
Second/s	31,536,000	2,600,640	604,800	86,400	360	60	1

Re-watch Little J & Big Cuz, Episode 13 ‘Night Owl and Morning Maggie’ and run the time code for the episode. Ask students what they notice about how the timing code is set out, e.g. 00:00:23:34. Explain which parts are for the seconds, minutes and hours, etc.

Using stopwatches, set indoor and outdoor activities for students to time themselves from start to completion. Have students create a chart and notate the times they complete each task within each school day, and the date they completed the tasks. Mark the times and tasks completed each day on a calendar. Repeat the tasks in the next month and have students record their results again on the chart, and on the calendar.

Ask students to compare the results from week to week and month to month. Overall, they should become faster at completing the same or similar tasks.