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!

Peek-a-Boo Groundhogs

I have a simple and cute groundhog craft to share with you today. I printed some coloring pages of groundhogs (found here and here), cut them out and had the kids color them.

Then each child got a half piece of white construction paper and drew either a sun or cloud at the top. (Actually, all my kids drew a sun, but they had the option of drawing a cloud.) For the bottom half of the paper, they covered it with glue and cotton balls to make snow. We just had a snow storm so we have plenty of snow on the ground now! But if you live somewhere warmer, you could easily make grass at the bottom by using easter grass.

When it was dry, I cut a slit right above the cotton balls and attached a big craft stick to the groundhog. At first, their paper just looks like it's a sunny day with snow-covered ground.

But when you slide the groundhog through the slit, up he pops, looking for his shadow!

 

The kids took them home and will find out tomorrow if what they predicted comes true!

Groundhog Day Craft

I saw this cute groundhog craft here and decided to try it out with my kids. First I painted one foot brown (and man, were those kids ticklish!) and made a footprint.

When it was dry, they made a face and added some sky, either sunny or cloudy. For the ground, I gave the kids a choice. My inspiration picture had grass, but here in the Midwest the ground is covered in snow for Groundhog Day. (Well, usually. This winter has been very, very mild and there is hardly any snow out there.) So I let the kids choose if they wanted to make grass with hand prints...

or snow with cotton balls.

I also printed out the poem and they glued it to their picture. It says:
Here's a little groundhog, furry and brown.
He's coming up to look all around.
If he sees his shadow, down he'll go.
Then six more weeks of winter -- OH NO!

Today was a cloudy and foggy day, so no shadow was seen by our local groundhog. Early spring it is!