What the song is about
The song walks through a normal day and week and teaches the three English prepositions of time: at, in and on. Each verse explains one of them with short, everyday examples, and the chorus puts all three together: In the morning, on a Sunday, at a quarter to three.
Useful words and expressions
- seven o'clock: exactly seven
- noon: twelve o'clock in the middle of the day
- half past one: 1:30
- a quarter to three: 2:45 (fifteen minutes before three)
- to tie my shoe: to do up the laces of a shoe
- the exact time: the precise time on the clock
- morning, afternoon, evening, night: the parts of the day
- the weekend: Saturday and Sunday
- Time is flying: time goes by fast (the usual idiom is Time flies)
- Keep it in your mind: remember it (more commonly Keep it in mind)
- It's time to go: we have to leave now
Grammar: in, on, at
AT is for clock times and exact moments:
- at seven o'clock, at half past one, at a quarter to three
- also at noon and at night
- parts of the day: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening
- months: in December, in July
- also years and seasons: in 2024, in winter
- on Monday, on Wednesday, on a Sunday
- a day plus a part of the day also takes on: on Monday morning, on Friday night
- dates: on 5 May
Careful: lines bent for the rhyme
- I sleep at night and close my eye: the singular eye is only there to rhyme with sky. In normal English you say I close my eyes.
- Except for night, we never say: this line is squeezed to rhyme with day and is hard to follow. It means that we use in for the morning, afternoon and evening, but not for night: we say at night, not in the night, when we talk about a usual time.
- In December, the winter took all the green leaves from the tree: this is a poetic picture. Leaves usually fall in autumn, and normally you would say the leaves fell from the trees.
- On the weekend is American English. In British English people usually say at the weekend.