🕒 Telling the Time

What time is it? Learning to tell the time is easy! Let’s meet the two hands of the clock: the hour hand and the minute hand.

A clock has two hands. The short hand is the hour hand. It shows the hour. The long hand is the minute hand. It shows the minutes.

When the minute hand goes once all the way round, 60 minutes have passed. That is 1 hour. Meanwhile the hour hand slowly moves on to the next number.

When the minute hand points to 12, it is an o’clock time. The number the hour hand points to tells us the hour: 3 o’clock.

When the minute hand goes from 12 to 6, half an hour has passed. That is 30 minutes. We say it is half past: half past 3.

Careful! At half past, the hour hand is between two numbers. It has passed 3 but not reached 4, so the hour is still 3. The right answer is half past 3, not half past 4!

Let’s split the hour into 4 equal parts. Each part is 15 minutes, a quarter of an hour. When the minute hand points to 3, it is quarter past 3.

When the minute hand points to 9, there are 15 minutes, a quarter of an hour, until the next hour. The hour hand is almost at 4. We say it is quarter to 4.

The hour hand goes round the clock twice in one day. That is why 8 o’clock happens both in the morning and in the evening: 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. We go to school at 8 in the morning and get ready for bed at 8 in the evening.

Summary: the hour hand shows the hour and the minute hand shows the minutes. Minute hand at 12: o’clock. At 6: half past. At 3: quarter past. At 9: quarter to. Now try it in Measures and Money!