Leap Year only comes around once every four years, which makes February 29 the perfect opportunity to bring a little extra excitement into your classroom! If you’re looking for fun Leap Year activities for kids, these simple and engaging ideas will help you celebrate while sneaking in meaningful learning with upper elementary students.
If you’re planning a Leap Year science lesson, this hands-on activity makes it easy for students to understand Earth’s rotation, revolution, seasons, and why we have February 29 every four years. These simple simulations help students visualize concepts that are often confusing when only taught from a textbook.
Before diving into the fun, take a few minutes to explain why Leap Year happens.
We have leap year because a solar year is 365.242 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.
We add an extra day to the year every four years to make up for that almost quarter of a day.
But did you know… we DON’T have a leap year if the year ends in double zeroes but isn’t divisible by 400?
In other words, in the year 2100, there will not be a leap year. Not in the years 2200 or 2300 either!
We probably didn’t realize this rule since we were all alive in 2000 when we DID have a leap year, but not 1900 when we didn’t! It’s part of the Gregorian Calendar “rules” that help to make up for those extra thousandths of a day- if we didn’t skip a leap day every now and then, we’d end up with a surplus of days!
For students to understand why we have a leap year and what February 29 means, they must first learn that Earth revolves around the Sun. And if you’re teaching Earth’s revolution and seasons, you are also going to be teaching about Earth’s rotation, too!
Any time you can have students “act out” science terms, you should totally do it. Not only will it help them remember the vocabulary, but it also helps them to “see” things that can be really abstract.
For example… rotate and revolve… these two terms are the most often confused in your classroom, I bet!
Students often mix up rotation and revolution because both involve movement. Rotation is the Earth spinning on its axis, which causes day and night. Revolution is Earth moving around the Sun, which takes about 365.242 days and causes seasons. Acting these out physically helps students internalize the difference.
Have students stand up and spin in one place, or ROTATE. Remind them they have to spin on their AXIS so they can’t rotate into their friends. 😉
Then, stand in the center of the room and have students move around you around the edge of the room, or REVOLVE around you.
And if you are really daring and not afraid of chaos, you can have the students simulate the Earth’s rotation AND revolution by having them spin as they move around the outside of the room!
There are a few great ways you can let students explore and experiment with a globe and a flashlight.
The easiest way for students to “see” night and day is to darken the room, turn on a flashlight, and shine it at the globe, then have students walk around the globe to see that the side facing the “Sun” is having day, while the other side is dark and has night.
To explore how the seasons occur, it’s great if you can collect multiple globes from classrooms around you so students can work in smaller groups.
Students should notice right away that the globe is tilted, just like the Earth. Have students move the globe to the top, left, bottom, and right sides of the table, keeping the axis pointed in the same direction each time.
They should be able to see the seasons happening because of the tilt- have them decide which places on the table would be our “summer” and “winter.”
If there is time, they could also experiment with what would happen if there were no tilt- would we have seasons? Have students hold the globe so that the axis is straight up and down, and move to each of the 4 spots around the table.
All of those exploration ideas work perfectly after using this Leap Year and Earth’s rotation and revolution freebie! This free science activity helps students connect Leap Year, Earth’s revolution, Earth’s rotation, seasons, and day and night in a meaningful way.
Students will read about how the Earth revolves, and why we have seasons and leap years. They will read about how the Earth rotates, and why we have day and night. Then they will answer questions that require knowledge from both passages, as well as a written constructed response!
If you love using paired texts in your classroom, you might also be interested in these high-interest paired texts!
