Baltimore City students flooded out of their classrooms at the end of the school day to catch a one-in-a-lifetime glimpse of this year’s total solar eclipse.

At Medfield Heights Elementary School, hundreds of students, families and teachers gathered on the back field to watch the sun disappear. School leaders gave each student a pair of protective glasses to accompany their homemade paper hats and paper-plate masks.

First-graders Karina and Suzanna Kain said they’d been learning about the eclipse in class all week.

“I learned that when the eclipse happens, the moon covers up the sun and makes it dark outside,” Karina said.

But during the eclipse, she said the sun actually looked like a “banana moon.”

“The sun kind of looks like the moon, but the sun is still the sun,” Karina said. “It’s just the moon is covering the sun in a way that looks like a banana.”

Suzanna said she knows a total solar eclipse only happens in the same place “once in a lifetime.”

“So it’s very, very rare,” she said.

It will be more than 20 years before another total solar eclipse hits North America, but it won’t be visible on the same path. Total solar eclipses only happen in the same location once every 400 years.

Maria Kelly, the Kain sisters’ first grade teacher, said her students conducted research and watched solar eclipse videos to prepare for the celebration.

“And we made some predictions on what we expected to see versus what they're seeing right now,” she said.

Kelly said she’s never seen a total solar eclipse either — only a partial one, in 2017.

“It’s getting darker right now, like a big change,” she said while watching. “I never experienced this, because I definitely can see stuff going on.”