Share the Discoveries from Explore Shadows

Your Shadow

Review the chart from the first week, “Our Ideas About Shadows,” along with photos and drawings displayed in the Shadow Museum and Art Center. Ask,

• When can you see your shadow outside? What are some of the times that you can’t see it?
• How can you make your shadow disappear?

• What parts of you can’t you see in a shadow? (Facial expressions, hair color, clothing, etc.) Why can’t you see them?

Look at the photos of the children and their shadows from the first day. Ask,

• What’s the same about you and your shadow?
• What’s different?

​Indoor and Outdoor Shadows

Compare indoor and outdoor shadows by asking,

• How is making a shadow indoors different form making one outdoors?
• What different kinds of light help you make shadows? (Sun, lamps, flashlights)
• How is making a shadow with a flashlight different from making a shadow with a lamp?

Changing Shadows (Outdoors)

Review the “How a Shadow Changes” chart and use it along with photos and tracings to talk about the way shadows change. Ask,

• What have you noticed about how our shadows change outdoors?
• What was different about the morning and afternoon shadows you traced? Why do you think that’s so?

Changing Shadows (Indoors)

Ask children to recall how they can made shadows grow and shrink.

• How can you change a shadow so it looks really big? When you do this, what else do you notice about how the shadow looks? (It’s blurry or fuzzy.)
• What would you do if you wanted to make a shadow smaller? What else do you notice about how this shadow looks? (Its outline is very clear.)

Shadow Puppets

Look at the shadow puppets you’ve displayed in the Art Center. Have children talk about any differences between what the puppet looks like and what the shadow it makes looks like.   

Conclude the unit by showing snippets of the videos you took of today’s shadow theater plays. (Tell children you can show them the videos at another time as well. If their parents or guardians weren’t able to attend the shadow play, show them the video at pick-up and have their child talk about what they did.)