Hooray for Leap Day!

What are you doing for Leap Day! If you have a friend or child born on Leap Day, I’m sure it will be a super big deal. And they probably have a better understand about leap day and leap year. But if you don’t, this may be the one time you actually talk about what Leap Year is and how it works.

So what are we doing today to celebrate?

Copywork/Recitation
Today, our copywork is the calendar phrase. This gives us a good basis for the day of discussion.

Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one. Except in Leap Year, that’s the time time, that February’s days are twenty-nine.

Math
Depending upon the age of your children, you can use this change to talk about the number of days in a year, maybe how any year that is divisible for four is a leap year. What is the next year that will be a leap year?

We chose to talk about using our number line (leaping along the number line) and figure out when the next leap year will be and how old she will be in the next leap year.

Then we talked about people born on February 29. We discussed if a person was born in the last leap year, this would be their first birthday but how old are they really? We had fun. She was very surprised to find out about someone being born in a leap year and what that meant.

We also talked about these leap year figures:

One Leap Year is equivalent to:

1.003 years (366/365 years)
366 days
8784 hours
527,040 minutes
31,622,400 seconds

Science (and Art)
Today we are stopping normal studies to study frogs. What better animal to study for leap year – a leaping frog. However, since its a great day here in Indiana we are planning a nature walk to the park to see if we can find some frogs and draw them in our nature book. Science and art about frogs – yeah.

Reading
Head to the library and look for some of these books.

The Leap Year Turtle by Robert Paske
Leap’s Day by Stephanie Bee Simmons
I Wonder Why the Sun Rises: and Other Questions About Time and Seasons by Brenda Walpole

Fun
Head outside and play leapfrog. Get your 10 minutes of exercise leaping like a frog. Play “Froggie Says” (instead of Simon Says) and the kids were giggling. Have them count their pushups and situps with ribbits. (“Do 5 froggie jumping jacks”- 1 ribbit, 2 ribbit, etc). Kids thought it was fun!