by CLEVELAND (AP) – Seventh-grade student Henry Cohen bounced side to side in time to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” playing in teacher Nancy Morris’ classroom, swinging his arms open and closed across the planets pictured on his T-shirt.
Henry and other classmates at Cleveland’s Riverside School were on their feet, dancing during an activity session related to April’s total solar eclipse. The second graders who had been invited in for the lessons sat cross-legged on the floor, laughing as they modeled newly decorated eclipse glasses. Dioramas with clay miniatures and medium-sized moons and flashlight “suns” occupy desks and shelves around the room.
Henry said his shirt showed his love for space, which he called a “cool mystery”. The eclipse is a one in a million chance, he said, and I’m glad to be here for it.”
For schools in or near the total path of the April 8 eclipse, the event encouraged lessons in science, literacy and culture. Some schools are also organizing viewing groups for students to experience darkness during the day and learn about the astronomy behind it together.
The school system in Portville, New York, near the Pennsylvania line, plans to load its 500 seventh- through 12th-grade students onto buses and drive about 15 minutes down the road, to an old horse. barn overlooking a valley. There, they will be able to track the shadow of the eclipse as it arrives around 3:20pm EDT.
The hours of the school day had to be rearranged to stay in session, but Superintendent Thomas Simon said that the staff did not want to lose the opportunity to learn, especially at a time when students experience so much of life through screens.
“We want to leave them here on that day feeling that they are a very small part of a wonderful, wonderful planet that we live in, and the world that we live in, and that there are truly wonderful things that we can experience in the natural world, ” said Simon.
Schools in Cleveland and several other cities in the path of the eclipse will be closed that day so students are not stuck on buses or in the crowds expected to gather. At Riverside, Morris came up with a mix of crafts, games and models to educate and engage her students ahead of time.
“They didn’t realize it was a big deal until we started talking about it,” Morris said.
Learning about the phases of the moon and eclipses is part of every state’s science standards, said Dennis Schatz, past president of the National Science Teaching Association. Some school systems have their own planetariums — remnants of the 1960s space race — where students can put on educational shows about astronomy.
But there’s no better lesson than the real thing, said Schatz, who encourages educators to use the eclipse as a “teachable moment.”
Dallas science teachers Anita Orozco and Katherine Roberts plan to do just that at Lamplighter School, arranging for the pre-K through fourth-grade students to watch it together outside. The teachers spent a Saturday in March at a teaching workshop at the University of Texas at Dallas where they were told it would be “almost criminal” to keep students inside.
“We want our students to love science as much as we do,” Roberts said, “and we want them to understand and be in awe of how crazy this event is.”
Struggling with young children can be a challenge, Orozco said, but “we want it to be an event.”
In training future science teachers, University at Buffalo professor Noemi Waight encouraged her student teachers to incorporate how culture shapes the way people experience an eclipse. Native Americans, for example, may view the total eclipse as sacred, she said.
“This is important for our teachers to understand,” she said, “so when they teach, they can address all of these aspects.”
The STEM Friends Club of the State University of New York Brockport planned eclipse-related activities with fourth-grade students in teacher Christopher Albrecht’s class, hoping to pass on their passion for science, technology, engineering and math to younger students.
“I want to show students what’s possible,” said Allison Blum, 20, a physics major focused on astrophysics. “You know those big mainstream jobs, like astronaut, but you don’t really know what the different fields are capable of.”
Albrecht sees his fourth-grade students’ interest in the eclipse as an opportunity to incorporate literacy into lessons as well—perhaps even to inspire a love of reading.
“This is a great opportunity to read a lot with them,” Albrecht said. He picked “What is a Solar Eclipse?” by Dana Meachen Rau and “A Few Beautiful Minutes” by Kate Allen Fox for her class at Hill Elementary School in Brockport, New York.
“It’s feeding their interest,” he said, “and at the same time, their imagination as well.”
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Associated Press writer Patrick Orsagos contributed to this report.
