How to Tell Time to the Nearest 5 Minutes | Reading a Clock

Welcome to Math with Mr. J. In this video, I'm going to cover how to tell time to the nearest five minutes. We'll go through a quick introduction, move on to some examples, and then I'll give you some practice that you can try on your own to see if you have this down. Now remember, when we tell time, we start by looking at the hour hand. That's the shorter hand. Then we look at the minute hand. That's the longer hand. And lastly, we put the hour and minutes together for our time. Now, I color-coded the hands in this example so we could easily tell them apart. The hour hand is red and the minute hand is blue. So starting with the hour hand, we can see that it's pointing between 10 and 11. This tells us we are past 10 o'clock, but we're not at 11 o'clock yet. So our hour is 10. Now we need to figure out how many minutes past 10 it is. Looking at the minute hand, we can see it's pointing at the 5. This does not mean 5 minutes. Remember, we count minutes starting at 12, and there are 60 minutes going around the clock. Now we don't have to count each individual mark, each individual minute. We can count by fives using the numbers. Each number on the clock represents 5 minutes. So we start up top at 12, which is 0 minutes, then 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and 25 minutes. So our minutes here, 25. Now we put this together for our time. Our hour is 10. Then we write a colon to separate the hour from the minutes. And then we write our minutes. So 25 here. And that's our time. We say this as 10, 25. Let's move on to some more examples. Taking a look at numbers 1 and 2 now, let's jump into number 1. So looking at the hour hand, it's pointing a little bit past 2. So it's a little after 2 o'clock. Our hour is 2. Then the minute hand is pointing to the 1. So let's count by fives starting at 12. So 5 minutes. Our minutes here are 5. We write this as our hour, 2, colon, and then our minutes, 5. We write 05 here for the minutes. Now remember, we always use 2 digits for minutes. So even though it's 5 minutes, we write 05. We don't just write 5. So 2, colon, 5 is incorrect. Again, we need 2, colon, 05. We say this as 205. We do not say 25. Again, we say 205 here. And this goes for the other single digit numbers as well. When the minutes are less than 10, we say 0 before the number. For example, we'd say 201, 202, 203, up to 209. Let's move on to number 2. So looking at the hour hand for number 2, it's pointing between 8 and 9. It's almost 9 o'clock, but not quite. So our hour is still 8. And then the minute hand is pointing to the 10. So starting at 12, let's count by 5s. We have 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 minutes. So our time here is 8, colon, 50. And we say this as 8, 50. Let's move on to numbers 3 and 4. Now let's take a look at numbers 3 and 4. Notice that these clocks are not color-coded. Both hands are black. So we need to use the length of the hands to tell them apart. Remember, the hour hand is the shorter hand, and the minute hand is the longer hand. So taking a look at number 3 here, the hour hand is pointing between 3 and 4. So our hour is 3. And then the minute hand is pointing to the 7. So let's count by 5s, starting from 12. So we have 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 minutes. So we write our hour, 3, colon, and then our minutes, 35. Our time here, 3, 35. Moving on to number 4, our hour hand is pointing between 11 and 12. So our hour is 11. And then the minute hand is pointing to the 4. So let's start at 12 and count by 5s. 5, 10, 15, 20. So our minutes here are 20. We write this as our hour, 11, colon, and then our minutes, 20. And we say this as 11, 20. Now that we've gone through some examples together, it's time for you to practice telling time on your own. So here is number 1 of your practice. I'll show you the hands of the clock here in a second. Now we will go through 4 of these. I'll give you 8 seconds for each before I show the time. Feel free to pause if you need to. Let's get started. Now for number 1, here are the hands. And I'm going to give you a little hint. Our hand is almost pointing to 4, but not quite. It's not 4 o'clock yet. So for number 1, what time is it? 3, 55. For number 2, 9, 10. For number 3, 7, 45. For number 4, 12, 15. So there you have it. There's how to tell time to the nearest 5 minutes. I hope that helped. Thanks so much for watching. Until next time, peace.