It’s a sunny March afternoon at Winchester Village Elementary School in Indianapolis, and teacher Natasha Cummings is leading her class in a brand new lesson. It’s the first time she’s teaching it – and also likely the last.
The second graders audibly gasp when Cummings explains the day’s activity: They’ll be simulating a total solar eclipse using the real sun, an inflatable globe and a moon made out of a play dough ball mounted on a stick.
On April 8, a narrow strip of North America will experience a total solar eclipse, in which the moon entirely covers the sun, darkening the sky so that only the sun’s corona, a ghostly white ring, will be visible.
