Telling time to the nearest minute: unlabeled clock | Math | 3rd grade | Khan Academy

Let's look at the clock and see what time is shown. The clock has two hands: this first shorter one, which represents the hours, and then there's a longer hand here that represents the minutes.

So we can start with the hours. This shorter hand right here—before we can figure out the hours, you may have noticed our clock is not labeled, so let's add some labels. At the top of the clock, here is always 12 o'clock; that's where the hour hand starts. The hour hand really only deals with these larger square marks. When it works its way to this first one, then it is now one o'clock, and when it gets to the next one, two o'clock, and three, and four, five, and so on until we work our way all the way back to 12 o'clock.

So now our hour hand—let's look at our hour hand right here. We can see it's just barely past the 10, but it hasn't reached 11. So that means our hour—it's after 10 o'clock; maybe 10:05, maybe 10:30. But it hasn't reached 11 yet, so we can safely put a 10 in for our hours.

Now let's switch to minutes. Here's our minute hand, and it looks like it's lined up to this little mark. Minutes are shorter, and they also use these shorter marks on the clock. The minute hand starts facing up, so when the minute hand was here, it was ten o'clock, and then it moved one minute. So it was one minute after 10, or 10:01, and 10:02, 10:03, 10:04, 10:05.

So this is 5 minutes after 10, and it keeps going—10:06, 10:07, 10:08, 10:09. Right here, and maybe you can see this pattern. It keeps going; here it was 0 minutes after the hour, so 0, then 5, then 10. So this one is going to be 15. We're going to keep counting by fives, and then one more minute after that is 16.

So it is 10:16 or 16 minutes after 10. One more here, let's again start with our hour hand, and we know our labels. We know this is 12, 1, 2. We could keep labeling, but our hour hand is facing right there, so we really don't need to. The hour hand is between one and two, so it's after one but not yet two, so it's one something.

By looking at our minutes, we can see it's quite a bit after one. This minute hand has worked its way around, and remember, this is going to be five minutes after 10: 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40. We can't go to 45; that's too far. So let's go back to 40 and now just count by ones: 41, 42, 43, 44.

Our minute hand lines up here to 44 minutes after one o'clock, or 1:44.