The Most Comprehensive Solar Eclipse Unity Study for Homeschoolers

Because if there is one thing that I am great at after homeschooling for 14 years, it is making a comprehensive unit study for homeschoolers!

My favorite thing about creating a unit study around an upcoming event is that the entire world becomes your hype man. Kids pick up on how excited everyone is about the eclipse, and learning more about it becomes just another way to engage with that excitement, mwa-ha-ha! 

What you see before you is THE most comprehensive solar eclipse unit study for homeschoolers. Almost all of it can be leveled up and down, usually just about simultaneously so you can work with your kids of different ages together. Pick and choose what you've got the time and materials for, interspersing activities you know your kids will love with activities that will stretch their skills and interests a little. 

Anchor Charts, Infographics, and Other Decorations

Because when you homeschool, even your decorations are educational!

solar eclipse bunting. Sew this from stash fabric and upcycled blue jeans. 

free printable easy reader book. If you've got a kid on the cusp of independent reading, you know the pain of keeping them in those teensy books! There can never be enough! Well, here's one more!

image credit: NASA/Tyler Nordgren

NASA posters and graphics. This poster is a good US Geography resource for a middle-grade kid to use to trace the eclipse's path on a map. The back of this poster is an excellent anchor chart to use with any age to inspire further research.

printable map of the Moon. Use this with binoculars or a telescope to identify the Moon's features, or simply display it because it's pretty!

solar eclipse diagrams. They're a little dry, which in my home makes them perfect for taping to the wall directly facing the toilet in the kids' bathroom. Ahem.

April 8 Eclipse Activities

Do these activities during the partial phase of the eclipse.

Are your eclipse glasses safe? Okay, do this one BEFORE April 8! My town is getting a total solar eclipse, and so eclipse glasses are EVERYWHERE right now. I love that, but I do NOT love how I've seen some of those glasses being stored and handled by the places offering them. PRETTY PLEASE triple-check your eclipse glasses well before the eclipse, have extras on hand in case of accidents, and store them so super carefully to keep them from scratches. 

Eclipse Soundscapes project. This Citizen Science project is a great way to encourage all ages to be mindful and present during the eclipse, as well as to document their observations. If you don't want to do something this formal, you can simply talk about being observant with all the senses during the eclipse, then have kids write--ideally the same day!--about the eclipse using as much multi-sensory detail as possible. Younger kids can draw their observations and impressions.

GLOBE Eclipse Citizen Science Project. If you're in a country that will experience the eclipse, you can use the GLOBE Observer app to record observations and meteorological measurements during the eclipse. Elementary kids can do this with family help, while middle and high schoolers can work more independently. For a longer meteorology study, use the GLOBE Observer app regularly. This project would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

pinhole camera image via NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

pinhole projector. This NASA one is a little overengineered, but the experiment they suggest would keep younger kids busy and engaged during the partial phase of the eclipse. Here's a more basic one that's more than sufficient for your purpose--my kids have made this kind, and it works great!

Art and Craft Projects

Because if you're not doing a weird and unwieldy craft project, are you even homeschoolers?

image credit: xkcd

Aztec Sun Stone drawings. This slightly guided, mostly creative art project is a sun-themed craft that works with a history/geography study of the Aztec people. If you didn't want to dedicate a huge amount of time to the study (but you still wanted that cute sun craft for eclipse decor!), you could get away with reading a couple of picture books or documentary clips, as long as the importance of the Sun Stone was covered.

chalk and construction paper solar eclipse. The easiest and best model that a kid can make of a solar eclipse is also the cheapest! I'm trusting you as a homeschooler to have chalk and construction paper in your house.

coffee filter partial eclipse. I wouldn't go purchasing a set of coffee filters just for this project, but if you've already got them on hand, go for it! Add some more interest and sensory art experience by having the kids color the filter not with crayon, but with washable marker, then let them drip water from an eyedropper to watch the ink bleed. 

cupcakes. This is the easiest and cutest eclipse treat I've seen yet, and it's pretty accurate-looking, too! Even young kids can help with these, and older kids can simply up the independence-level, and/or bake the cupcakes completely from scratch.

glow-in-the-dark solar eclipse T-shirt. Because who doesn't love an excuse to play with glow-in-the-dark paint?

moon map for coloring. My kids had SO MUCH FUN one week when I printed and assembled this Moon map, taped it to my wall, and invited them to color on it with markers. 

mosaic sundial image via Marvelously Messy

mosaic sundial. You can incorporate this into the sundial lesson in the Astronomy section, below, but especially if you've got younger homeschoolers, it's totally okay to just make this simple (but beautiful!) sundial together as a family and have a fun summer exploring how it works. Learning how to mosaic is actually a surprisingly accessible skill even for younger kids, and you might find yourself with a whole new Mosaic Special Interest.

solar eclipse cake. Marshmallow fondant is shockingly easy to make, so other than the difficulty coloring it (I've never found a good black food coloring, so tbh I'll probably just buy some pre-dyed fondant), this entire cake is dead easy. My teenager and I are going to make this for our own solar eclipse guests, but I'll probably do a Victoria sandwich and skip the habanero...

solar eclipse sandwich. Even younger kids should be able to make this eclipse sandwich layout mostly independently, and it's a great way to encourage them to try a couple of perhaps new-to-them foods. 

Sun, Moon, and Earth masks. Get out the cardboard and the paints to make these giant masks with the kids... then send them outside to chase each other in them!

total eclipse tostadas. My kids LOVE themed meals! We'd make an entire spread of eclipse-themed food and then eat it while watching a nerdy NASA documentary.

Astronomy Activities, Crafts, Games, and Resources

This time period around the eclipse is the BEST time to get a kid excited about astronomy, not to mention make memories of this special, once-in-a-homeschool-education opportunity.

cookie Solar System. If you're learning about the Moon and the Sun, you might as well learn about the entire Solar System! This activity is suitable for preschoolers through high schoolers, with scaffolding for younger kids and more detail, creativity, and independent calculations and research encouraged in older kids.

If they're not doing science with dirty fingernails, how do you know they're homeschoolers?

Investigating prisms. This is a great time to dive into everything sunlight. The youngest homeschoolers can enjoy process-oriented, experiential play with prisms, while older kids can start to learn about the science of light refraction. Middle schoolers can develop their own experiment, and high schoolers can write that experiment up in the Astronomy Lab Notebooks for a lab science credit in their transcripts.

Moon journal. The most educational way is to have kids make their own from scratch by tracing a bottle cap into their observation journal or onto a piece of paper, but here's a printable template if you'd rather have a leg up. Have them sketch the Moon's phase every night and record the date, time, and weather. Incorporate a simple meteorology study by also having a kid record the temperature, air pressure, wind speed, etc. Kids can make DIY versions of all those measuring tools, or you could splurge on a simple weather monitoring tool.. or a fancy one!

paper telescope models. These paper models are quite fiddly, so I wouldn't even offer them to anyone other than the craftiest of high schoolers. My kid was practically born with a craft knife in her hand, and even SHE found them tricky! But if you've got a mechanically-minded kid who's very interested in the instruments of astronomical observation and exploration, it can be worth even making these yourself so that they can have a tactile representation of these instruments. The models aren't so delicate that younger kids couldn't incorporate them into their small-world play.

phases of the Moon demonstration and model. THIS is how you teach the phases of the Moon to kids of every age! The Oreo model is just for fun, but the prospect of making it is very good incentive to attend to the lesson, ahem. And here's a similar worksheet to keep them busy during their sibling's gymnastics lesson...

phases of the Moon flip book. Here's another great way to give kids an understanding of how the Moon waxes and wanes, especially if you can bring them outside regularly to watch it happen for themselves. You can make this flip book for the youngest kids to enjoy, but kids even a little older can help with assembly, and even older kids can use this as a jumping-off point for a flip book or animation study. My younger kid went through a HUGE DIY flip book phase when she was little!

Planet Hunters TESS Citizen Science Project. High schoolers can help scientists discover exoplanets by analyzing images from the TESS mission to look for eclipses of other stars. The project is technically complete as of right now, but does expect to obtain more data to analyze. This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

sidewalk chalk Solar System model. In the lead-up to the 2017 eclipse, my kids researched each planet and drew its picture on a labeled index card, then taped the cards to popsicle sticks. One beautiful afternoon, we headed out on our straight city-wide walking trail and we measured and placed the planets in their correct spots along the trail. It was just as fun walking back to the car, because instead of being tired and cranky, the kids kept racing ahead to find and reclaim their planets! SUCH a good way to reinforce a sensorial understanding of measurement AND astronomy!

solar eclipse foldables. For those whose kids love lapbooks and mini books, I've got you! These fill-in-the-blank infographics are also helpful for kids to use as illustrations when they write paragraphs or essays about the eclipse. This mini book is better for younger kids, who can sneak in a little scissors practice, too, mwa-ha-ha!

Solar Jet Hunter Citizen Science Project. High schoolers look for and mark solar jets to help scientists understand this phenomenon. This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

Solar oven. Even the littlest homeschoolers can help make a solar oven that will melt a s'more! Add a hot dog solar oven for a complete camping meal. Don't do this pizza box oven, though, because it's kind of crap. Older kids can do their own experimentation and engineering, and if you're really serious about it, you can invest some time and money into making an absolutely superb solar oven that will properly cook food.

sundials. Shadows are an accessible way to introduce any age of homeschooler to a study of the Sun, and kids who are studying shadows LOVE to make sundials! There are a million ways to make a sundial, from the preschooler-friendly to these more sophisticated papercrafts. 

Sungrazer Citizen Science Project. This project is for high schoolers or very interested middle schoolers. In it, you scan through images of the Sun taken by the SOHO Observatory, looking for previously undiscovered comets! This would work as a lab for a high schooler wanting to study Astronomy and earn a Lab Science credit on their high school transcript.

Sun prints. All you need is a pack of cyanotype paper to make the coolest prints and shadow art! When we did that set above, way back in preparation for the 2017 eclipse, we were all fascinated by the way the sun print plus the shadow print of the rectangular prism made a perfect cube on the paper. If your kids (or you!) are extra crafty, you can even buy cyanotype FABRIC! To add some academic rigor, combine sun prints with this free worksheet set. 

word searches. I recently reintroduced word searches to my Girl Scout troop, and they were all super into them! I feel like we as a people don't do enough analog puzzles these days, sigh. Here's a pre-made set of word searches, but you can also have kids make their own with graph paper as a template. 

History, Geography, and Social Studies Activities, Crafts, Games, and Resources

Learn about the cultural significance of eclipses around the world and throughout time.

Again with those dirty fingernails! I'm pretty sure that was the year that I put a nail brush in her Easter basket...

gingerbread Stonehenge. This is a delicious way to study ancient astronomy and the importance of the Sun to our ancestors. To be sure, it's not the most academically rigorous project, but it makes a fun capstone to a short unit on Stonehenge and its astronomical purpose.

track the path of the eclipse. Make, print, or buy a line map of the United States, then help kids use their resources to trace the path of the eclipse. Depending on the kids' interest levels, this can be the spine for an entire US geography study.

Video of Navajo and Cherokee teachings. It's probably a little too dry for the youngest homeschoolers, but if you engage with the video along with your kids you could make it fun for kids who are a little older, and middle and high school kids ought to be fine.

 

 

Cool Stuff to Buy

If you've got a little extra room in your homeschool budget, splash out with these educational materials that will encourage and expand your kids' interest.

• glass prism set. Younger kids can spend years playing with these, exploring rainbows and shadows and angles and light. Now that my kids are grown (sob), I've made little macrame hangers to put them in all my sunny windows so I can still enjoy them!
• planet stickers. My kids loved these even into high school! I let them place them (in planet order, of course!) on the wall of our long front hallway, and it's a decoration that we still all enjoy. I mean, if you don't have giant stickers of all the planets in order in your front hallway, how will your guests know that you're homeschoolers?
• Moon sticker. We had to put this in a different room from the planet stickers, obviously, because otherwise the scale would be wrong.
• star stickers. Kids do not seem to know about star stickers these days, because every kid I've ever showed them to has been SO EXCITED--especially when I explain that they go on your bedroom ceiling! My own homeschooler, as a high schooler studying astronomy, actually used star stickers to put all the major constellations all over the walls and ceilings of our entire house. It's kind of my favorite thing!
• sunprint paper. Explore shadows or make awesome art.

Okay, that basically encompasses everything that a homeschooler needs to know about eclipses! My kids wouldn't even tell you that they particularly love astronomy, but I know that our eclipse units have been among our all-time favorite homeschool studies. I mean, we got to watch these amazing astronomical occurrences FOR SCHOOL!

Your kids are going to love these activities, too.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Astronomy: How Does A Color Filter Affect the Temperature of Light Refracted through a Prism?

 Here's my biggest homeschool tip: never get rid of your homeschool stuff!

Big kids may not use those sweet sensory materials and basic manipulatives the way that they did when they were little, sure, and all that stuff from the early years may sit in your closet for a distressingly long time, but every now and then these big kids DO need that stuff, and it's awfully nice to have it. We've repurposed all kinds of the kids' early learning stuff into our homeschool high school, from the map puzzles that I dragged back out when Will was studying AP Human Geography, to the Base 10 blocks that helped the kids wrap their heads around binary during our Robotics and Programming study, to the beakers and balance scale that helped the kids understand mass and volume that we now use in science labs.

For this Honors Astronomy lab, Will repurposed the colored cellophane that I bought back in 2015 when the kids were going through a phase of having big interests in color theory (we did ALL the color wheels and color mixing and color filter stuff! It was so fun!). She also used a set of glass prisms that I WISH I'd bought back when my little learners were super interested in rainbows, dang it, and an infrared thermometer that I bought in 2014, after seeing the one that Will used to earn her Junior Scientist badge at Yellowstone. 

By this time, we'd played around quite a lot with prisms and their angles of refraction, and how a color filter might affect the dispersal of light, etc. So when I challenged Will to create her own experiment involving prisms, she thought it would be interesting to investigate how a color filter might affect the temperature of each color of refracted light from a prism.

I love the way that this experiment flows so naturally from her prior explorations. To make this lab work, she needed to know the prism shape that would give her the widest spread of individual colors, and have that experience of measuring the temperatures of each color, and noticing how a color filter affects the refracted rainbow.

If we'd owned these prisms throughout her childhood, that's probably information that she would have already picked up through sensory play and simpler experiments, and who knows how sophisticated her lab ideas would be now?

It's surprising how many astronomy labs a kid can complete right on her own back deck!

Will's got a few more labs that she ought to do to finish up her lab notebooks for a couple of her science studies (the goal for a high school lab science course is at least ten labs), and now I'm trying to think of more ways to use this awesome colored cellophane in experiments. 

Maybe she can grow bean sprouts under colored light for AP Environmental Science? 

P.S. Interested in more of the hijinks involved in homeschooling two high schoolers? Follow along in my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Are you guys still getting over the total eclipse, too? Is it just me?

Y'all, I had been so pent up with excitement over the eclipse that by Sunday afternoon, I'm surprised that my partner didn't just drug me like a dog about to go on a plane trip. Studying the eclipse intensely with the kids for a month just got me even more worked up--I've been revved up about this eclipse for a year. My partner got us our hotel room 50 minutes from Carbondale, Illinois, Eclipse Capital, almost a year ago. Heck, I have had our eclipse glasses since MARCH!

Plan A was to leave our house on Sunday, stay the night at our hotel 50 minutes from Carbondale, then drive the next morning to Crab Orchard National Wildlife Preserve, just outside Carbondale's city limits, and watch the eclipse there. Plan B, if Crab Orchard was too busy or the traffic on the highway into Carbondale was too heavy, was to head a little further away and watch the eclipse from Cedar Lake, a reservoir more to the east. Plans C and D, if Carbondale was overcast, were to drive either towards Nashville or St. Joseph, Missouri, until we were free of cloud cover, and then find a suitable spot to watch.

To that end, we left the house on Sunday morning, just in case the traffic was already heavy. Since it wasn't, though, we ended up with plenty of time to spend the afternoon in Evansville, Indiana. We played at a local playground, found a Krispy Kreme so that the little kid can continue to live her dreams of eating ALL THE DOUGHNUTS, and then tag-teamed the kids around Angel Mounds, on account of I'm not used to planning vacations that include dogs and I didn't notice that dogs weren't allowed in the archaeological area until after we'd paid our admission:

Three Sisters Garden, with the addition of sunflowers

Here's a partial reconstruction of the wattle and daub stockade that surrounded the community.

This is what the inside of the stockade would have looked like, absent kids trying to look up the Native American's skirt.

This is Mound A, the Central Mound. The chief probably lived on the highest point, with some other community members living on the lower platform.

Even the lower platform is high, especially considering that it was built using basket-fulls of dirt, probably carried by hand.

Here's what the village might have looked like:





I'm always the most fascinated by the artifacts that are uncovered in a particular place. The architecture or other physical features are one thing, but these are items that regular people used as part of their everyday lives.



And look! The perfect complement to the weeks that the little kid and I spent studying prehistoric fashion as part of her History of Fashion study!

See the holes drilled into those teeth? It's like the holes that we drilled into shells!

We had an early night at our hotel (why does my quest to order from independent pizza places wherever we stay mostly result in us eating a lot of highly mediocre pizza?), with me checking the radar hourly and fretting over all the traffic reports, and an even earlier morning. The good news is we passed the north-south biscuit and gravy line in our travels, so there was a crock pot of sausage gravy waiting for me, along with cold biscuits, microwaveable cheese "omelets," and bad coffee down in the hotel's breakfast buffet. Every single other person on the planet was also shoving breakfast into their faces and bolting out the door, too--we'd booked our hotel so early that it was a normal price, but the night before, on our way down to the pool, I'd heard the check-in clerk telling some guys that they were full, but she'd heard there were still a couple of rooms at the Fairfield Inn down the road that were going for 900 bucks apiece.

We were on the road by 6:30 am for a 50-minute drive, with little traffic to speak of, and were pulling into an only quarter-filled parking lot at the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Preserve an hour later. There was an air-conditioned visitor center across the lot, with working bathrooms and flushing toilets, and a lovely wooded hike that led to a lovely lake, but honestly, we spent most of the morning like this--



--and like this--

--yep, hanging out in the shade right off of the parking lot. The dog was content, we had plenty of books, and the car was right there whenever we wanted a snack or a drink--it was perfect! The parking lot filled within the hour, and then we were also treated to the sight of cars coming in and circling hopelessly before driving on--ahh, the satisfaction of sitting snugly in our spots in the face of the desperation of others!

Around mid-morning, rangers even came out and closed off the entrance to our lot entirely, so we could move our lawn chairs out of the shade and onto the asphalt, to better watch the show:



Even before you could really tell a difference in the day without your eclipse glasses on, things started to get weird. Just as we'd been told, the dappled light under our tree began showing us the crescent images of the sun:

Just as we'd been told, our shadows on the sidewalk had crisper, sharper edges:

This is because the light is coming from a smaller and smaller point, not diffused as it is when it comes from the entire body of the sun.

The crickets began to sing. The ambient light began to seem oddly dim, but not like sunset, when the light is leaving from the side; this was dimness like a room with the light bulb on low. It grew noticeably colder, as 99% of the photons normally striking us through sunlight were now being deflected. A breeze blew, as the air pressure became affected. We could see that it was visibly darker to our west. And still we watched:

And then there was this:



I was peeping at the sky when the last light left, so I saw the diamond ring with my naked eyes. I turned to make sure the children were watching, and saw the little kid still with her eclipse glasses on, so I ripped them off her face--I wasn't even thinking about damaged eyesight; I just wanted her to see that spectacular beam of light for the second that it was visible.

I'm not even going to try to describe the total eclipse, itself, to you. My photo doesn't really look like it, but I haven't seen any photos that do. I can't think of the words to say that would make it clear to you what it was like, if you didn't see it for yourself. Just... it was beautiful. It was the best thing that I've ever seen in my entire life, and yes, I know that I'm supposed to say that my first look at my children is the best thing that I've ever seen, but I was half out of my mind both times I gave birth, completely terrified both times, both times in pain. This was nothing like that. This was just beautiful, just this ephemeral, beautiful thing that you had to experience right that second for all that you could, because you couldn't rewind the experience to play it again, couldn't watch it on TV later and get the same effect, couldn't come out the next weekend and see it again. It lasted 2 minutes and 40 seconds, all of which are impressed on my memory, and yet when the diamond ring appeared again on the other side of the sun, it felt like surely it hadn't been that long. Surely it had just been a couple of seconds.

As the totality passed, someone began to play The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" from their car stereo, and people were already packing their cars back up. The kids were beaming. My hands were shaking so hard that I had trouble taking a drink of water. We hit ALL the eclipse traffic on the way back that we missed on the way there--we only saw one car crash happen right in front of us, but the drive that had taken 3.5 hours the day before took more like 7+ on the way home, bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way.

I don't know what mood I'd be in if I didn't know that there's another total solar eclipse coming in seven years, but there is one coming, and I am buoyant. Better yet, Friends, my town is in the path of totality. 

Lemme just repeat that: MY TOWN IS IN THE PATH OF TOTALITY. MY HOUSE WILL SEE AN ECLIPSE!!!

You can come stay in a tent in my backyard, and I'll haul out the lounge chairs. The little kid, who will be graduating from high school the next month, will decorate us eclipse-themed doughnuts. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, will read and ignore us. And we'll have another powerful encounter that's beyond belief, in just seven years.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!