On an analog clock, the hour hand shows the hour and the minute hand shows minutes. Count by 5s along the clock (5, 10, 15, ..., 55) for the minute hand, then add extra minutes by 1s.
Practice with real clocks and clock manipulatives. Draw and label clock faces.
Confusing hour and minute hands; not counting minutes correctly; difficulty near the hour.
You already know how to read an analog clock to the nearest 5 minutes. Telling time to the minute extends that skill one step further: instead of stopping at the nearest labeled tick mark, you count individual minutes between the marks. The minute hand still travels the same clock face, but now every single mark — all 60 of them — counts as exactly one minute.
The trick is to use your skip-counting by fives as a scaffold. When the minute hand is between two numbers on the clock face, first count by fives to the number it just passed, then count individual minutes from there to where the hand actually points. If the minute hand is two ticks past the 4, count: 5, 10, 15, 20 (landing on the 4), then 21, 22. The time is __ :22. You're not starting over from scratch — you're finishing with single-minute precision where your five-minute reading left off.
The hour hand provides the first number in the time. Remember that it moves continuously throughout the hour, never sitting exactly on a number unless it's precisely o'clock. If the hour hand is anywhere between the 2 and the 3, the hour is 2, regardless of where the minute hand points. The two hands work together: the hour hand answers "which hour are we in?" and the minute hand answers "how many minutes into that hour?"
Common confusion arises near the top of the clock. When the minute hand is close to 12, the hour hand is near transition — it may look almost on the next number. If the minute hand is past the 6 (more than 30 minutes have passed), the hour hand has traveled over halfway toward the next number, so it can look deceptively close to it. Reading the hour hand carefully — asking "which two numbers is it *between*?" rather than "which number is it near?" — prevents misidentifying the hour when the hands are in awkward positions.