Area students prepare to witness solar eclipse on Monday

Apr. 4—As the nation prepares for Monday's total solar eclipse, students and teachers in the Decatur area are taking advantage of an event that will not occur again in the contiguous United States for 20 years.

Priceville Junior High teacher Holly Lake said sixth graders have been learning about the eclipse in every subject area. Science teachers have focused on eclipse vocabulary words and safe viewing practices. In math, students have been doing graphing activities related to eclipses, while in social studies they have learned about myths and beliefs about eclipses throughout history.

In reading and language arts classes, students have been reading informational passages about eclipses.

At Moulton Middle School, sixth grade science teacher Patti Terry taught her class last week about the path of totality, a 15-state path from Texas to Maine where a total solar eclipse will be visible. She did this by setting up time lapse exercises showing the path the moon travels.

"As far as curriculum, we are going over what a solar and lunar eclipse is," Terry said. "One of the things I'm teaching is the moon's orbit is actually at a tilt and our orbit around the sun is actually tilted. We have an activity where students are going to NASA websites and they relate the path of totality to the maps on the website."

After 30 years of teaching in Lawrence County, Terry said she has witnessed three solar eclipses with her students. She said events like those are something science teachers should take advantage of in their curriculum.

"Any time you do something that's this big and unusual, you spark that creativity," Terry said. "Students may think this is something they want to focus on or they might want to work with NASA. It opens up a door of opportunity for them."

Mary Sue Fleischauer, gifted specialist with Decatur City Schools, agrees that it's important to take advantage of natural occurrences such as eclipses.

"Students learn on a much deeper level when they get to experience something rather than just read about it or even watch a video about it," she said.

Fleischauer is coordinating a trip for 87 middle school students in the Decatur City Schools gifted program. The students, along with parents and teachers from Austin Junior High School, Austin Middle and Decatur Middle, leave Friday to spend time exploring St. Louis before traveling to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for the eclipse on Monday.

The Decatur area will experience a partial solar eclipse in which the moon will obscure about 90% of the sun, but the students traveling to Cape Girardeau will experience more than four minutes of totality — time in which the moon completely blocks the sun.

Fleischauer said after taking students to view a total solar eclipse in 2017, she and other gifted specialists started to research the best place for students to view the total eclipse in 2024.

"We took about 100 students to Tennessee in 2017 to view that total solar eclipse, and it was an incredible experience," Fleischauer said.

A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. The total eclipse that will be viewed on Monday on a totality path along a diagonal line from the southwest to the northeast across North America will show the moon completely covering the sun, an event the United States will not see again until Aug. 23, 2044, according to NASA.

Austin Middle seventh grader Sarah Provenzano witnessed the 2017 eclipse in Tennessee and said as the moon was passing over the sun, she noticed the environment around her start to change.

"It was really cool because you could see the moon going over the sun and it got completely dark," Provenzano said. "You could see the stars and you could hear the bugs and insects and birds stop making noise. It was like it was night for two minutes in the middle of the day."

Sixth graders Peyton Hughes and Rorie McCormack are looking forward to the trip to Missouri after experiencing the 2017 partial eclipse in Alabama.

"I saw a solar eclipse once while I was in school and we went outside and laid in the grass to watch it," Hughes said. "I remember it being dim rather than dark."

McCormack said her teachers have been explaining to them the differences between partial and total solar eclipses.

"With a total solar eclipse, the moon covers the whole sun, but in a partial eclipse, the moon only covers part of the sun," McCormack said.

Sixth grade student Amiel Arguelles said one of the more unique aspects of witnessing a total solar eclipse is viewing the sun's corona, the outermost layer of its atmosphere.

"When you see it (during the eclipse), you will see a bright white light," Arguelles said.

Locally, the eclipse will begin at 12:43 p.m. Monday, will reach maximum coverage at 2:02 p.m. and will end at 3:19 p.m.

Those watching the eclipse locally could deal with some weather issues, according to Andy Kula, National Weather Service in Huntsville meteorologist.

"Right now, we've got partly to mostly cloudy skies forecast through the day with 20 to 30% chance of rain and thunderstorms," he said, during the eclipse. "Now, they're low chances, they're 20 to 30% right now, and obviously that could change. But we do have considerable clouds forecast at this point though."

Even if clouds are a problem, the total eclipse can be viewed on NASA-TV at www.nasa.gov/nasatv.

— wes.tomlinson@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2442.