Behold! A New Year is Born!

How the Year 1 B.D was created.......

I love how creative children can be when given opportunities!

We've been looking at whether the year zero exists or not for a few weeks now.  Today the concept of
1 BC and 1 AD without a year zero came up again when we were finding ways to measure elapsed time from 2105 to 2637BC   (a student had found out that was the year a lunar calendar was developed).



We discussed whether we need to add a year between the year 1BC and the year 1 AD.
We had lots of different theories about what we should do when suddenly a student had a creative solution to our dilemma.

Let's combine 1 BC and 1 AD to make the year 1B.D!!!

 B.D?

= Before Domini.   So the second before Jesus was born is B.C and the second he was was born it becomes A.D (Anno Domini- Latin for 'In the year of our Lord')

So if your birthday was that year, you could say, "I was born in 1 B.D"

Plus, we just solved our confusion of that gap of time between 1 BC and 1 AD. It's now the same.

We wondered if we should contact the maths department at Oxford University to share with them our newly created measurement of time idea.

Just then, someone laughed and showed us how B.D could indeed stand for Before Domini, but it could also stand for Birthday = Jesus' birthday. We felt for sure we had created something really great!

We then thought we should also let Oxford Uni know about our other unit of measurement of time we created last week.

How the unit of measurement called 'Twenty-oney-nighty' was formed.....

Some students figured that since we have:

° a week       =   1 week
° a fortnight =   2 weeks
° a month     =  4 weeks

......we need a measurement of time for 3 weeks.  They thought of how fortnight comes from '14 nights' then a 3 week period should be called a 'twenty-oney-nighty'.

We all loved the idea and also appreciated the need for a 3 week unit of time so it was officially approved in our classroom and we use it quite often in discussions such as:

- When are our next holidays?
- In twenty-oney-nighty  :)