What's the Deal with Leap Year? is to be used with the resource Historical Perspectives from Mr. Mault's Marketplace on Teachers Pay Teachers.
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What's the deal with leap year? People rely on clocks to no time. Clocks rely on Earth to track time, but somewhere in that chain of command the math gets a little mixed up. Clocks are designed and set according to the Earth's rotation. One full rotation of the Earth is a day. Most people think that's an exact 24 hours, but it isn't. That's how the calendar gets a little off every year. In about 365 days the Earth orbits completely around the Sun. That's when a calendar year of 12 months restarts. So a calendar year is based on 365 days that aren't exactly 24 hours long. The little differences in time each day start to add up.
Speaker 1:
Leap years fix the mathematical problem that clocks and calendars create by adding a day every four years. Without leap years, seasons would move a little bit every year. Sometimes trees would lose their leaves in spring, and winter's temperatures would be scorching hot. In the US In the 1500s, people used the Gregorian calendar. Like us. They realized that if they added one extra day to the calendar every four years, time would be mostly accurate. Again, that extra day continues to be added in February every four years. 2024 is a leap year, so February has 29 days in it. Leap years have 366 days instead of the usual 365.
Speaker 1:
But don't worry your digital clocks and calendars. They adjust automatically, just like they do for daylight savings time. Unlike leap year, daylight savings isn't a math problem, it's a light problem. Many states adjust forward or backward by one hour so that sunlight hours are more convenient. Clocks have nothing to do with it, but Earth does. Its tilt decides when the sun comes up. Because we can't change its tilt, we change our clocks. The Gregorian calendar focuses on Earth's rotations and orbit around the sun. As mentioned, However, there are other kinds of calendars. The lunar calendar, for example, focuses on the moon's rotation around the sun. Some people use a lunar calendar, but they also fix the math. They have a leap month. For example, 2023 was 13 months long and had two February's. If this is a little bit confusing, just remember that there's an extra day in February every four years and it's called a leap year. And remember that only 1% of people around the world have a birthday on February 29th.