Shadow Puppets

We studied shadows this past week, in honor of the upcoming Groundhog Day. I asked the kids to bring a flashlight to school on Thursday. Luckily it was a cloudy day so I was able to get the room pretty dark by just closing the curtains. We have a skylight in our room, so a sunny day would not have worked. The kids partnered up and found a spot next to the wall. They put their flashlights on a chair and shined them onto the wall. I had printed and cut out a bunch of shadow puppets (found at National Wildlife Federation Kids and at 100 Directions) and taped straws to them.

The kids took a few at a time to their spot and put on a little puppet show! It was hard to get pictures because they were all moving their puppets so fast, it was just a blur. But I got a few.

I used a hole punch on some of them (an idea I got from the website where I found the templates), which added a little special touch.

Here's little bunny Foo Foo and the good fairy!

Since we had our flashlights, we decided to have center time in the dark! Here's our coloring table:

And I put out Legos for the building center because someone brought in a Lego lantern, so we used it for our light.

And I printed out some simple worksheets of shadow matching (found here and here) and they did those under the skylight.

On Friday, we made footprint groundhogs.

Find out how we made them here.
Another thing you could do with a shadow theme is take the kids outside and have them trace each other's shadows with chalk! We did this last summer.

This is something we can't really do in the winter here in the Midwest, but it was a lot of fun!