You Maya remember it, you Maya not

We looked at the Maya calendar today in class.  
I used to think it was complicated, but decided to be an alien at the start of the lesson and asked the class to explain the Western calendar to me to see how bizarre that is:

- There is a year (seems fine with me, planet orbits and all that)
- and it is split into 12 months with weird names, some of them area named after ancient gods, come Roman rulers and the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th months are names after numbers meaning 7, 8, 9 and 10 (um, OK, I'll accept that with a comment that it's mess)
- these months have 30 days, or 31, and there's one that has 28, but this is 29 once every 4 years (makes sense!)
- there are days (yep, planet rotation, get that), there are 365 in a year (cool) and these are named after things in the solar system, Norse gods and a Roman God (inconsistent)
- there are 7 days in something called a week, there are 52 weeks in a year.  But 52 x 7 = 364 and there are 365 days in a year (so that's not true then)

Well that's all straight-forward then.

The Maya calendars seemed a little more easy to make sense of after all that!  We looked at the tzolk’in (the sacred calendar) and the haab' (solar calendar), but didn't have time to get onto the long count.  This lovely item held up by Jnr Jnr is an awesome way for them to see how they work together, and they grasped it really well.