The Great American Eclipse #4530

This is a discussion for The Great American Eclipse Experiment. Feel free to connect with the Learning Team here, or to discuss experiment tips, ask questions, leave comments or suggest experiment variations here.
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I had a great time with the students at Franklin Elementary in Salt Lake City School District collecting data on the morning of the eclipse!


We had a great time collecting data using the sensor board. Here’s a snapshot of the data we collected and you can see a clear dip in luminosity and temperature.

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Follow up data analysis with Ms. Porter’s class at Franklin Elementary!

Just followed the link to the CODAP eclipse data set and that set is wonderful for demonstrating the power of the sun and the affect it has on the Earth. While we were not in the area of totality, students did feel a distinct temperature change of as much as 6 degrees F. They wanted it to be darker, we were about 90% but they did feel the air cool. Got the whole school to wear eclipse glasses for the event.

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I loved this activity. Seeing a total solar eclipse was definitely on my bucket list and my son and I took off work & school and drove 7 hours to see it. Sadly, most of the schools in my area didn’t allow students to leave the classroom to view it and some even put butcher paper over the windows so nobody looked outside :woman_facepalming:

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Where does this lesson fit in with your curriculum?
The timing couldn’t be better! Tonight is the total lunar eclipse, so I can easily tie this in to a class discussion about eclipses. It would also tie in with graphing in math class. I love a crossover lesson that includes math and science! I also teach a big astronomy unit and would love to incorporate this activity into that next year.

Which part or parts of the lesson would your students need extra support in order to be successful?
I would need to clarify the difference between the UV measurements and the Luminosity. I had expected them to be about the same, but the luminosity took a sharp dive after maintaining a steady reading for 2000 seconds whereas the UV exposure was a steady decline for over 3000 seconds.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your role during the class. What does a successful teacher actively do during this lesson?
I would recap our earlier lessons on eclipses and explain that we were going to work on some data taken during the 2017 Solar Eclipse. I would also review the parts of a graph and how to plot data. I make the whole class sing “Ah, ah, ah, ah, over and up, over and up” to the tune of Staying Alive with me.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your student’s role during the class. What does “student success” look like?
Students would follow along on their chromebooks as I modeled how to navigate the websites and how to load the data into a graph format. I should see students creating graphs by dragging and dropping the data onto the graphing ap. I want to hear them talking about connections that they are making between the time and the variables.

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Where does this lesson fit in with your curriculum (if the lesson is not a fit for the class you teach, how could the lesson be modified so that it is applicable to your curriculum)?
This is another that would fit nicely into our waves unit as well as a into the climate change unit. This is also great practice for students to use technology and data. This could also be used in our heat transfer lesson or to lead into our heat transfer engineering challenge.
Which part or parts of the lesson would your students need extra support in order to be successful?
This would be a new procedure for them so I would need to model this for them and perhaps give them some more detailed (visual) steps to follow the first time.
If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your role during the class. What does a successful teacher actively do during this lesson?
I would actively model the process for them for the first graph and data analysis. I would then circulate through the class informally assessing their progress and understanding by asking questions and checking progress towards our goal.
If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your student’s role during the class. What does “student success” look like?
Students would be working in small groups to follow the instructions and complete the tasks. I might add a sharing component where students visit other groups to compare notes and talk about patterns they observed.

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I also got excited about the lunar eclipse and then I remembered that I live in Northern Utah and we rarely see the moon in January. We had a winter storm come through last night and so we could not see it. Cool pictures that others posted online though!

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  1. This lesson would be great to practice data analyses in any of my science courses. I have to say the lunar eclipse was awesome last night, but the solar eclipse last August was mind blowing. I wished I had had this lesson to leave with my students because I couldn’t find any scientific data analysis type of lesson about the eclipse for my sub plans. This would have been perfect!

One of the main things I talked about with my students when I returned was the difference in temperature- it was astounding! Also, it would have been cool to take luminosity data in the path of totality and the path of where my students were to show the differences.


This is a picture I took through a 10in Reflector near the end of the eclipse.

  1. The part of the lesson that students may need extra support is the CODAP site. I can see students being slowed down by using the CODAP site simply because it is new and a different tool. Otherwise, I love the ease of the site and the instructions are simple to follow.

  2. A successful teacher would demonstrate accessing the information and changing the axes on the graph, but then step back and let the student work through the exercise, offering support as needed. I also believe that the discussion afterwards would be crucial to developing the concepts learned. It is one thing to follow a “recipe book” of instruction but another to process the information and apply it.

  3. Student success would look like students engaging in the process, working through the guided worksheet, but then taking that information and applying it to something more- perhaps it would lead to further experimentation or discussion, a science project, or more data analysis of other solar eclipses.

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@ardusatexplorer-4761 I love your method of teaching the song to help students graph! Ha ha- that’s hilarious. It made me think I could use something like that with my students even though they are in high school! Sometimes even high schoolers forget simple techniques and are often missing some of those basic skills.

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@ArdusatExplorer-4769 Having students find and discuss patterns is a great skill to help them prepare for higher level science and math courses. I appreciate that you included that in your plan!

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I like the idea of this lesson, but it is much more difficult than my students could handle. I did teach about the eclipse last year, and we study quite a bit about our solar system, moon phases and such, but I would have to do a lot of tier 3 vocabulary teaching and background knowledge set up for this one. I love the idea of them collecting data, I also really like the videos and will use them in class, but the connection with the data collecting sheets and understanding what the data means will be over their heads. I would just maybe stick to the actual data collecting of temperature. I’m not really sure, I’m open to ideas for 4th grade students. Please keep in mind that I have ESE and ESOL students so my lessons have to be adapted to their level.

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This looks cool, but honestly, I had trouble with this myself and cannot imagine doing this with middle school students. I love having kids study “real” data and analyze it, but this would be too much for them without a lot of support.

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Your photo is amazing! I’m so glad that you got to see the eclipse.

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Our first day back to school was Eclipse Day… Ha. I wished we had more time to build some background and prepare students for the event. We had a professor come out and show the eclipse through telescopes and viewing glasses.

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Where does this lesson fit in with your curriculum (if the lesson is not a fit for the class you teach, how could the lesson be modified so that it is applicable to your curriculum)? This lesson does not fit in with my curriculum, but I am sharing it with the science teachers here at school.

Which part or parts of the lesson would your students need extra support in order to be successful?
I believe that the students would not need any extra support. They are usually more savvy than I am, technically speaking.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your role during the class. What does a successful teacher actively do during this lesson? With this lesson, we are collecting actual data, which is very important. The teacher should be the lead scientist, with his or her own data collection, modeling what students should be doing and measuring.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your student’s role during the class. What does “student success” look like? My students would be the interns, collecting data and then analyzing them, while creating a spreadsheet of results by class and time.

Where does this lesson fit in with your curriculum?
This lesson does not really fit in with my curriculum, but I did teach about the solar eclipse last year and my class watched it on TV.

*Which part or parts of the lesson would your students need extra support in order to be successful?
This lesson was considerably difficult for me. I’m not sure if my students would be able to complete it on their own. I’m thinking they would need quite a bit of support to complete the lesson.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your role during the class. What does a successful teacher actively do during this lesson?
With this lesson, a successful teacher would actively walk around and provide support and guidance to the students as needed.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your student’s role during the class. What does “student success” look like?
As I said, my students wouldn’t be able to complete this lesson on their own, but the student’s role would be actively engaging in this lesson and being able to complete the data collection with or without additional guidance from the teacher.

I also felt like this lesson was a little too difficult for my students.

Where does this lesson fit in with your curriculum?
Although this year was sort of applicable with the Lunar Eclips … albeit not during school time … it could be used at the end of the year when we do a space and rockets unit. It would be interesting to measure changes during different parts of the day to possibly determine best viewing times for launches.

Which part or parts of the lesson would your students need extra support in order to be successful?
Although students have a rudimentary understanding of some of the terms used during the experiment, their units, specific means of measuring and what specifically they relate to would most definitely have to be clarified.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your role during the class. What does a successful teacher actively do during this lesson?
Some basic statistics review would be useful to prepare students to work with the tables and graphs. A little homework reading could also be assigned to bring students up to speed on both solar and lunar eclipses and then we could have a class discussion about things we would want to notice, record and measure during such an event.

If you were to teach this lesson to your class, describe your student’s role during the class. What does “student success” look like?
Ideally students would be participating during an actual event but because the likelihood of that is rather slim, we could use virtual data combined with some varied daytime / nightime readings to put together an “event” as a case study. Students could also research previous events and document data from those. Collecting and organizing the data is one thing, but I’d also like to see my student be successful at sharing this data with the wider student body, perhaps during science and engineering fairs and / or elective fair discussions.