Students at Gwynedd Square Elementary School in Upper Gwynedd wear solar eclipse glasses provided by Merck to watch the solar eclipse on Monday, April 8 2024. (Dan Sokil – MediaNews Group)
Glasses provided by Merck donation
As the skies darkened above Gwynedd Square Elementary School around 3 p.m. Monday, and the temperature dropped, the screams started.
“Look! There it is! Do you see it?” and more, as more than 600 students watched the solar eclipse.
“Today, we learned about how to keep our eyes safe, and that it’s kind of like sunburn: it can damage your eyes. And you only have one pair, so you have to protect them,” said fourth-grader Sela Geiger. “It’s an amazing experience: you would love it if you could watch it, like we can.”
As she spoke, Sela and classmate Izzy Ryan took turns posing with their eclipse glasses; Sela said she did remember the 2017 eclipse, when she was just five years old, and said she’s still deciding what she wants to be when she grows up, while Izzy was looking forward to seeing the sun mostly disappear.
“It’ll be like Halloween, but it’ll be cool, because we know it’s coming, and we’re not staying up late, it’s in the middle of the day,” said Ryan, while Geiger said she could feel it getting colder as the sun disappeared behind the moon.
“My teacher said we’ll get 90% of it, so we won’t get to see complete darkness like in some areas, like in Canada, but we will get to see a lot of it,” Ryan said.
With clouds blocking a full view at times, kids and teachers filed out of the school into rows on the playground, organized by class, with the youngest sporting paper crowns decorated with planets and reading “I saw the solar eclipse: April 8, 2024.”
Superintendent Todd Bauer, watching among the crowd with his glasses on, said the district heard others debate sending students home to watch the eclipse, before deciding to stay in school and see the eclipse. Enter Merck: the Upper Gwynedd-based pharmaceutical company has partnered with the district on programs before, and was a natural choice to ask to provide roughly 14,000 pairs of teal-colored glasses so students could watch in safety.
School principal Jason Bashaw narrated as the moon gradually moved between the sun and earth, warning the kids to put their glasses on, and not look up without them.
“There are lessons to be learned in history, in math, in science — it’s STEM learning at its finest. It’s really putting learning into a real-world application,” Bauer said.
“In 2024, we talk about real-world learning: not necessarily just something in a textbook, but hands-on experiences for kids. This is a great example of that: we’re taking a real world example of something that’s happening today, and won’t happen for another 20 or 30 years, and let kids experience it together,” he said.
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