Lesson 12

Hours, Minutes, and Seconds

Warm-up: What Do You Know about 1 Hour? (10 minutes)

Narrative

The purpose of this warm-up is to invite students to share what they know about 1 hour and its relationship with other units of time. The work here prepares students to convert units of time and solve problems later in the lesson.

Launch

  • Display “1 hour”.
  • “What do you know about 1 hour?”
  • 1 minute: quiet think time

Activity

  • Record responses.

Student Facing

What do you know about 1 hour?

Student Response

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Activity Synthesis

  • “Other than using hours, in what other ways can we measure time?” (minutes, seconds, days, months, years, decades)
  • “When might it be more helpful to use hours than to use other units? When might it be more helpful to use minutes or seconds?”

Activity 1: Mai’s School Day (20 minutes)

Narrative

This activity develops students’ understanding of hours and minutes as units of time and helps them to see 1 hour as 60 times as long as 1 minute.

In converting hours into minutes, students may reason additively when the time in hours is a low single-digit number, but are likely to reason multiplicatively when converting, say, 8 or 10 hours into minutes. When they relate the operation of multiplication by 60 to converting hours to minutes, students make use of structure (MP7). To convert fractional numbers of hours (\(\frac{1}{2}, \frac{1}{4}\), and \(\frac{3}{4}\) hour), students might choose to think in multiplicative terms (for instance, \(\frac{1}{2} \times 60\)) but are not expected to do so. Instead they can rely on their prior knowledge about a quarter of an hour and a half of an hour to reason about the number of minutes.

MLR8 Discussion Supports. Synthesis: Some students may benefit from the opportunity to rehearse what they will say with a partner before they share with the whole class.
Advances: Speaking

Launch

  • Groups of 2
  • “On a weekday, how do you spend the hours between the time you wake up and the time you go to bed? How much time do you spend getting ready for school, going to school, and at school? How do you spend your time after school?”
  • “Take a quick minute to list your usual weekday routine, knowing that it may vary from day to day. You may choose to focus only on one day—say, Monday.” 
  • 1–2 minutes: quiet think time
  • 1–2 minutes: partner discussion
  • “How did you show the amount of time you spend on each activity?” (In hours, in minutes, as intervals of time—for example: 8:30 to 3:30)
  • “Let’s look at how Mai spends her day in hours and minutes.”

Activity

  • 7–8 minutes: independent work time
  • 2–3 minutes: partner discussion
  • Monitor for the ways students convert large numbers of hours and fractional hours into minutes.

Student Facing

The table shows how Mai spends the time she is awake on a school day.

activity   hours    minutes 
morning routine 1
getting to school \(\frac{1}{2}\)
time at school 8
getting home from school \(\frac{3}{4}\)
homework and reading \(1\frac{1}{2}\)
playing and family time 2
bedtime routine \(\frac{1}{4}\)
  1. Complete the table to show how many minutes Mai spends on each activity. Be prepared to explain or show your reasoning.

  2. How many hours does Mai spend at school? How many minutes is that? Explain or show how you know.

    image of a student packing lunch, putting shoes and coat on.
  3. How many minutes does Mai sleep on a school night? Explain or show your reasoning.

Student Response

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Activity Synthesis

  • Invite selected students to share their responses and reasoning. Start with students who reason additively about the number of minutes in a given number of hours. End with those who frame the relationship between a whole number of hours and the number of minutes in multiplicative terms. 

Activity 2: Precious Minutes and Seconds (15 minutes)

Narrative

In this activity, students reason about the number of seconds in given time in minutes. Students see that 1 minute is 60 times as long as 1 second.

Engagement: Internalize Self-Regulation. Synthesis: Provide students an opportunity to self-assess and reflect on their own progress. For example, say, “This is our sixth day working on problems about measurement and conversion. What have you learned about these topics? What do you still want to learn about?”
Supports accessibility for: Memory, Social-Emotional Functioning

Launch

  • Groups of 2
  • “Have you used a timer or a stopwatch to count the number of seconds of doing something? What were you timing?”
  • Consider challenging students to do something for a full minute (for instance, holding breath or balancing on one foot) and displaying a timer that shows the second hand or the number of seconds increasing or decreasing.
  • “Which one is longer: 1 minute or 1 second? How does 1 minute compare to 1 second?” (One minute is 60 times as long as 1 second.)

Activity

  • 7–8 minutes: independent work time
  • 2–3 minutes: partner discussion
  • Monitor for the different ways students find the number of seconds in 10 and 30 minutes and the ways they reason about the last 2 problems.

Student Facing

Diego set a timer to make sure that things are not done for too long or too short an amount of time.

activity  minutes   seconds 
brushing teeth 2
showering 3
heating a cup of milk in the microwave \(\frac{1}{2}\)
break during homework time 5
quick workout 10
daily reading 30

image of a timer showing 4 minutes
  1. Complete the table with the number of seconds for each activity. Be prepared to explain your reasoning.
  2. Diego noticed that on a television channel, commercial breaks are often between \(1\frac{1}{2}\) and \(2\frac{1}{2}\) minutes long each. How long are they in seconds? Explain or show your reasoning. 

  3. Diego’s workout starts with 4 minutes of warm-up and stretching, followed by 100 seconds of jumping jacks.

    If he works out for 10 minutes exactly, how many more seconds are left in his workout?

Student Response

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Activity Synthesis

  • Display the table. Invite students to help complete the table by sharing their responses and reasoning. 
  • “How did you find the number of seconds in 30 minutes?” (Multiply the number of seconds in 10 minutes by 3, multiply the number seconds in 5 minutes by 6.)
  • Select other students to share their reasoning for the problem about commercial breaks. 
  • Highlight that we can decompose the number of minutes to find the number of seconds. (For example, \(1\frac{1}{2}\) minutes is 1 minute and \(\frac{1}{2}\) minute or 1 minute and 30 seconds, which is 90 seconds.)

Lesson Synthesis

Lesson Synthesis

“Today we used hours, minutes, and seconds to express lengths of time. We converted hours to minutes and then minutes to seconds.”

Display two tables as shown.

hours minutes
1
5
10
minutes seconds
1
5
10

“If someone claims that the missing numbers in the first table are the same as the ones in the second table, would you agree? Why or why not?” (Agree. An hour is 60 minutes or 60 times as long as 1 minute, and a minute is 60 seconds or 60 times as long as 1 second. The relationship between hour and minutes is the same as that between minute and seconds.)

Complete the table as a class.

Consider asking, “How can we use the information in the tables to help us find the number of seconds in 1 hour?”

Cool-down: Time on Chores (5 minutes)

Cool-Down

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