Leap into Learning!
Leap into learning with a celebration of Leap Year 2016 that lasts into March!
Hi and welcome back to Attentionology for K – 5 Teachers!
Today is Leap Day, February 29, in a Leap Year…2016.
Use this day to help students leap into learning…
all the way into the month of March.
As we all know, Leap Day and Leap Year only come once every four years.
Why let the celebration end when the final school bell rings this afternoon; leap on!
Invite kids to leap into learning in the days ahead with attention-getting activities that span your curriculum…
Leap into the Science and Math of Leap Year – Using age-appropriate language and visuals, review with students that we define a year as the number of days it takes for our planet Earth to orbit the sun.
Add more science learning to this activity by asking upper elementary students if anyone knows what rotation a day represents.
Answer: A day is one rotation of the Earth on its own axis.
Welcome to a World of Learning! is a perfect graphic to help students leap into learning.
Explain that Leap Year is the result of a scientific and math problem…
The problem: Earth doesn’t orbit the sun in a round number of days.
The math…It actually takes 365 and a quarter days for planet Earth to make a full circle around the sun.
Ask if anyone knows how Leap Year factors into this problem.
Answer: If we didn’t have Leap Days and Leap Years every four years, our months would eventually shift into different seasons.
Challenge your class to imagine how odd it would be for July or August to be in spring, not summer, as we know these months in the Northern Hemisphere and the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere.
Leap into Planet Earth Art – Find images of the earth to share with your class. Add a title, like Welcome to a World of Learning, that turns your graphic into a poster for a classroom wall.
Use the poster to introduce an art activity that invites children to create their own images of Earth.
How else can you invite kids to leap into learning?
Try these activities… (more…)
Barbara Cleary has been serving as a resource to hundreds of educators for more than 25 years.
An award-winning writer, producer, teacher, and trainer, Barbara’s focus is on offering easy, fun tools and tricks that support K-5 curricula and assist teachers with classroom management.
