Video Transcript
Skip count in fives to find out how many minutes are in one hour.
When we look at the clock face, one hour is once all the way around. And so, one hour is the same as the minute hand starting at the 12 and go all the way round back to the 12 again. But how many minutes is this? Each of the little dots around this clock face represents one minute. So what we could do is count each individual dot. But this might take us quite a while.
So that’s why this problem asks us to skip count in fives to find the answer. Skip counting is a way of counting quickly because we’re counting in jumps of a certain number, in this case jumps of five. Let’s imagine a number line that shows every five really clearly. Now imagine taking that number line and bending it all the way around the clock face. We can see that this is exactly what a clock face is.
It’s just a round number line, and so we can skip count in fives just as if we were skip counting along a number line: five, 10, 15, 20. Let’s continue the pattern: 25, 30. Half an hour is 30 minutes. I could actually use this to work out how many minutes are in an hour if we know that half an hour is 30 minutes, but let’s carry on skip counting: 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, and 60.
So instead of taking a long time counting every individual minute, we’ve skipped counting in fives, which is much quicker, and we found out that there are 60 minutes in one hour.
