Telling time to the minute requires reading both the hour hand and minute hand. The minute hand pointing to a number tells how many groups of 5 minutes have passed (e.g., pointing to 6 means 30 minutes). Between numbers, count individual minute marks.
You can already read time to 5-minute intervals — you know that when the minute hand points at the 6, that's 30 minutes, and when it points at the 9, that's 45 minutes. Each number on a clock face represents 5 minutes of the minute hand's journey. Between any two neighboring numbers, there are 5 small tick marks, each representing 1 minute. Reading time to the minute means being precise about exactly which tick mark the minute hand is on, not just which number it's near.
Here's how to read any time: first, identify the hour from the hour hand (whichever number it has most recently passed). Then read the minute hand in two steps. Ask "which numbered section has the minute hand just passed?" — multiply that number by 5 to get the base minutes. Then count how many individual tick marks past that number the hand has traveled. Add those two amounts together for the exact minutes. For example, if the minute hand is 2 ticks past the 4, that's 4 × 5 = 20, plus 2 = 22 minutes.
The language of time has some quirks worth knowing. When minutes are 0–30, we say the time directly: 8:22 is "eight twenty-two." When minutes are past 30, we might say "twenty-two minutes to nine" (60 − 38 = 22 minutes remaining). Both describe the same moment. Clock reading to the minute is also your first encounter with a base-60 counting system — unlike our base-10 number system where ten ones make a ten, here sixty minutes make one hour. That's why 60 minutes doesn't roll over to 1:60 but instead to 2:00. Keeping this structure in mind will help enormously when you calculate elapsed time — how much time has passed between two clock readings.