One Giant Leap

MIGHT AS WELL JUMP: As soon as the kids were lucid his morning, I asked them if they knew what day it was. CJ promptly guessed, "Wednesday?" which was correct, but not what I was fishing for.

Annabelle piped up with, "Leap Day!"

Bingo!

I suggested they start their Leap Day off by catching some air on the mini trampoline, which they did.

We started our Leap Year discussion by reviewing the '30 days has September ...' saying. I pointed out to the kids that as if poor February wasn't already the oddball being left out of not only the months with 30 days, but the "all the rest have 31," too, AND February doesn't even get to stick to its odd 28 days every year. Poor, poor, pitiful February - the kids found that hysterical for some reason.  

Next up, we turned to BrainPOP, where the featured movie of the day was about Leap Year. It did a nice job of explaining the genesis of the day due to the fact that the Earth actually takes about 365.24 days to circle the sun rather than 365 exactly. And while that .24 days might not seem like much, over the course of hundreds of years it really adds up, which messes with other dates of significance, like the equinox, when seasons start and such. Leap year/day is necessary to keep in synch with the astronomical or seasonal year.

We learned about Julius Caesar's calendar, which was an improvement over the previous widely-used time-keeping model, but still flawed. Eventually, the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian calendar, which we still use today. Under its rules, most years that are evenly divisible by 4 are leap years. Unfortunately, the math to remember doesn't stop there, since years that are evenly divisible by 100 aren't leap years UNLESS they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case they ARE leap years. Follow all that?  :o

We also learned that the Hebrew and Chinese calendars have methods other than leap day/year to make up for the time difference. Interesting stuff!

LEAPIN' LIZARDS!: In addition to catching air on the trampoline, we got a little more Leap Day exercise (and math!) in by seeing how far the kids could leap. First, I had them do a standing jump - without even letting them crouch or bend their arms or anything.

CJ actually had a NEGATIVE result that round, winding up behind where he started.

Next round, they were allowed to crouch and swing their arms all they wanted.

And in the final round, they were allowed a running start.

Kirby was basically freaking out during the entire process, trying to figure out how she fit in.

UP NORTH: After a week's absence due to the school district's mid-winter break, we were back to classes at Shoreline today. In art, Annabelle said she and her fellow students started working on a class project. In science, the kids worked on graphing the weather from January and March and were told they'll have a weather unit test next week. Time to study up!

SEUSSVILLE: As part of our working up to Dr. Seuss' birthday and the theatrical release of "The Lorax,"  the kids spent some time exploring Seussville, the official Web site of Dr. Seuss, this morning. They both started on the create your own Who page.  Here's CJ's Who. ...

Nifty avatars complete, they began playing games. Annabelle reports she played all three Horton-themed games, a "Hop on Pop" themed game and her favorite was the A-Maze-ing Green Eggs and Ham game. In it, "You use physics to get the green eggs to the green ham," she explains.

FOCUSED: A couple of weeks ago I received an email inviting me to participate in a focus group at the Pacific Science Center. Since we're regular visitors there, I thought it might be well worth my time to learn about some of the ideas on their horizon.

It was an interesting 90 minutes to be sure. Not sure how many they were expecting but there were only three of us there forming the focus group. We were outnumbered by the PSC people.

We were shown several potential future display/exhibit concepts and asked for feedback. I hope I provided some useful ideas and perspective. My parting recommendation to them was to make sure to stay focused on science. That might sound obvious, but I think it was worth saying.