The eclipse of 2017 will be one of those monumental events in which you always remember where you were and who you were with.
For the students of Lipscomb Elementary School on Concord Road in Brentwood, they will remember being on the baseball and athletic fields next to the school, with their classmates, teachers and some parents, watching as the world slowly got dark and then light again in the middle of the afternoon.
All of Williamson County Schools did special lesson planning and all came outside to watch the eclipse.
Over the loudspeaker at 1 p.m. at Lipscomb, the classes were dismissed to go outside.
Each class had a spot on a field, where they put things out like white sheets, to see odd shadow effects that looked like wavy lines, before and after totality. There were 20 seconds of totality at Lipscomb Elementary.
The school spent a lot of time planning the optimal eclipse experience.
“In preparation, we moved our STEM week to this week, and will finish up after today,” Carol Cortez, Lipscomb Elementary Assistant Principal, said. “Our fifth grades went to the Adventure Science Center for a field trip, and last Thursday we had someone from the Dyer Observatory come and speak to all of our second through fifth graders.”
She credited a teacher with being the catalyst behind everything eclipse viewing at Lipscomb.
“I took a training class this summer, and I made the suggestion that it would be cool if we all came out and viewed it,” Stephanie Guidicy, who was out on the ballfield with her fifth-grade class, said. “We talked about the different phases of the eclipse, and before coming out here, we stood on the back courtyard watching it.”
Her class crowded around her, excited. The kids did a countdown to totality. 20 more minutes, 15 more minutes, 10 minutes, and it started to get dark and the temperature dropped a bit.
At 1:30 p.m., the sun went totally behind the moon, and it was a deep purple twilight for 20 seconds. And for just a few seconds, everyone was silent.
That was the moment that will last a lifetime.
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