Students around the Hills found ways in the last several weeks to learn why and how the eclipse would happen. These opportunities were not based just on indoor activities, but also outdoor movement-based experiences to help students build a greater understanding of the movement of the sun, moon, and earth.

Klaudia MaslowskaAsendorf’s sixth graders at Oxford, for example, spent time the morning of eclipse day in the field just past the playground creating a scale model of the sun, moon, and Earth. Klaudia had determined that in order for the scale to be accurate, her students would each need to create a moon from clay that was three millimeters across. (Their “Earths”, to scale, were twelve millimeters.) They put their moons on the end of a toothpick and headed out to the field where they marked out a 150-foot space to represent the scale distance to the sun. There, one student was tasked with holding up the “sun” – a three-foot across cardboard cut out.

With Klaudia’s help, sixth graders then held their tiny moons four and a half inches from their faces, at the 150-foot distance from the sun, and were able to perfectly cover the sun with their moons. As she explained to them, this scale representation explains why the “tiny” moon is able to create an eclipse: the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, but it’s 400 times farther away.

The sixth graders were able to share their demonstration with other students who came out into the sunshine to learn more, before being dismissed early, eclipse glasses in hand, to head home and see for themselves the fascinating alignment that was in store.

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