Time you can see
Young children don’t read “3:42” as “a bit more than half left”. A shape they can: the coloured disc on this page starts full and shrinks like a slice being eaten, so everyone can see how much time is left at a glance, from across a room. Grown-ups who want the exact minutes can still read them in small print below.
The page opens at five minutes with the Pie display and the Gentle sound, a soft chime at the end instead of a beeping alarm. There is no warning ping: for children, the shrinking pie is the warning.
At home
Use it for the moments that start with “five more minutes”: the end of screen time, getting dressed, tidying the toys, a turn on the swing or with a shared toy. Show the child the full pie, say what happens when it’s empty, and press Start. When the chime sounds, the timer said it, not you. Short turns of two or three minutes suit toddlers; tap a length under the timer to change it.
In the classroom
Put the pie on the projector with Full screen (or press F) for group work, silent reading, a quiz or clean-up. Type the task into the Label box (“Partner reading”, “Clean-up”) and the class sees it written over the pie, full screen included. The label stays on your device. For a ten-minute task with a two-minute heads-up, the 10 minute timer opens with a pie and a warning ping.
Tips
- Colours: pick another pie colour under Display and sound, for example a different colour for each activity of the day.
- Repeat: for rotations between stations, tick Repeat so the next round starts on its own.
- No sound at all: choose No sound when the chime would wake a sleeping sibling; the pie still empties.
- Short on time: press + to add a minute while it runs, and R to reset.
For an hour-long lesson on one screen, the 1 hour timer shows the biggest digits instead.