Many students who have been learning about the sun and moon are excited to watch the solar eclipse on the morning of April 8. While most students will be looking up at the sun during the eclipse (with protective eyewear), Majestic Elementary Arts Academy students will also be looking down to notice the effect of the eclipse on shadows and to capture them in an art project.

“Students will use chalk to trace patterns that appear on the playground,” school STEAM specialist Meredith Llewellyn said. Fourth grade students, whose science core standards include learning to find observable patterns in the sky, will also create oil pastel models of the eclipse. 

Science is an art form at Majestic Elementary Arts Academy, an arts integration public school located in West Jordan.

Llewellyn works with students weekly, integrating art concepts with the science standards they are learning.

“Every subject that I teach, I teach with art integration,” Llewellyn said. “Everything is paired with an art standard and with a science or math standard. It just helps the kids understand it better and it helps them engage in it better. And it’s really fun.”

When first graders learned about light and shadows, they created a pop-up character with its shadow drawn in the background. They copied the style of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ to show the movement of the sun and moon, another grade level science standard.

Second graders used 3D paper art, puppets and seeds to create art projects showing what they’d learned about pollinators, plants and animal habitats.

Third-grade scientists learned about patterns in weather by learning about tree rings and then painting their own.

Fourth-graders had fun playing with the concepts of potential and kinetic energy by designing models of interactive playground equipment.

Llewellyn said that as students create art projects, the academic concepts are reinforced, such as when she had fourth graders create an art piece based on sound wave patterns.

“They learned about sound waves, and the difference between all the types of amplitudes and frequencies and wavelengths, by repeating it as they draw it,” Llewellyn said. “And then they color it, then they paint it, and that whole process just embeds it in each layer.”

Many of the science and math-based art projects were on display at the school’s annual art show in March. Fourth-grader Joey Machado saw his clay dinosaur fossil creation on display and was easily able to recount the steps in the process of the fossilization he learned when he made the project.

Llewellyn is always looking for new methods and materials to incorporate into her lessons. When developing an activity to teach sixth grade students about the process which formed the planets in our solar system, Llewellyn discovered an old technique of wool needle-felting which uses a similar process.

“We talked about how our planets are made by coming to the center, so when you needle-felt, you push the felt and the wool into the center,” she said. “It was just a way to teach a concept that you don’t get when you just watch a movie or you just draw a picture. When you are actually pushing something towards the center, and discussing it with kids at your table, that just adds to the lesson more than I could with 1,000 words. I just stood back and listened to them teach each other.” λ