Seated before a group of second graders, Melissa Bohrer opened a book and began to read — drawing the youngsters in as she went.
“Say that with me,” said the librarian at Ivan Green Primary School in East Irondequoit. “Totality,” the students said in unison.
“Where the sun is completely covered by the moon,” Bohrer read.
Her mission is to teach kindergarteners, first- and second-graders about Monday’s solar eclipse, and about the phenomenon that only a sliver of the planet will experience: totality.
Rochester is within that sliver, so Bohrer is readying her students to understand it when it happens.
“We’re going to have a chance to experience some parts of an eclipse today,” Bohrer said as she divided up the students into groups and sent them to different tables in the library.
At one table there were blocks to build a shelter to protect little figures from solar rays. There was chalk at another table where students created the sun’s corona which will be visible during totality.
“Hands-on experiences really help our students to learn the best, and understand the ‘why’ and really appreciate what’s happening,” Bohrer said. “I really feel that they need to have the knowledge and the information so that they can take in this awe moment in history that we’re going to have right here in Rochester, New York.”
Kash Parent, a second-grader, ripped up pieces of magenta playdough and rolled them into balls. Then he smushed each one onto little, illustrated moons on a laminated piece of paper.
“We’re making little playdough balls, and we’re going to put it on each moon to represent what the moon is going to do at the solar eclipse,” he said.
Each of those moons was part of a sequence demonstrating the covering and revealing of the sun during an eclipse. The most exciting part for Parent was at the top of the page, when the sun was barely visible.
“It's going to be like a ring around the moon, and it’s going to look like a black hole but just with a ring around it,” he said.
At the last activity station, Gregoria Zurita was volunteering with another group of students who were making solar eclipse flipbooks.
“I’m from Bolivia, and I have a little granddaughter in the school,” Zurita said in Spanish. “In my country I have worked 37 years as a teacher. That’s why I like to be around. I’m happy with the children and I like to help.”
Zurita remembers a while back when she saw a total solar eclipse when living in Bolivia.
She doesn’t remember exactly when, just that she was a student at the time. According to the National Science Foundation, Bolivia was in the path of totality on 12 Nov. 1966.
“It gets almost like night,” she said. “Even the chickens want to go to sleep, that’s how it gets. The darkening is quite interesting.”
This time, Zurita will share that experience with her granddaughters, who, if Bohrer has anything to say about it, will be prepared.
After the second-graders left class that day, eclipse glasses in hand, group of special education students filed in. Bohrer said their lesson would be a little different.
“They need, as learners, for it to be a little bit more concrete,” Bohrer said. “And it lends to their learning style. If it is too abstract for them, they will not be able to make those connections.”
They start with a story too, and then color in pages that show the sun, the moon and the Earth.
“Not all of us learn the same way, even in a regular general education class,” she said. “So to be able to modify and change how we do things so that our learners can learn is truly important.”
Bohrer wants all her students to continue learning outside the classroom.
“The more knowledge they have, it’s power,” she said. “And they’re really becoming learners in the world then. Because they’re using the experiences around them to further their understanding of the eclipse.”
