Welcome Deirdre from JDaniel4′s Mom.  She brought this post to my readers at Home Learning Journey while I am taking preparing for our new arrival to our family that is coming on 2/13/13.  Here is a little info about Deirdre and what you can find at her site:

Deirdre Smith writes/owns JDaniel4’s Mom. After twenty years as a elementary school and technology resource teacher in Northern Virginia, she became a stay at home mom in upstate South Carolina. Her blog features ways she and her 4 year old are exploring learning, crafting, creating healthy meals and living life to its fullest.

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Every Groundhog’s Day we wait eagerly to see if a groundhog in  Puxsutawney Pennsylvania named Phil will see his shadow. Shadows or silhouettes are not only good predictors of the weather they are great for working on visual discrimination skills and picture clues.

Recently my son and I worked with a groundhog and other animal shadows creating an animals shadow activity using an egg carton painted to replicated a piece of ground filled with animal burrows, animal stick puppets and some animal shadow cards.

How did we put it together?
We started the activity by painting an old cardboard egg carton brown and poking holes in between the egg sections to hold the puppets.

I created the animals for the puppets and created shadows of the animals using construction paper and magic markers. I cut out the shapes of the animals and their shadows at the same time by layering a piece of black paper behind each piece of colored construction paper I needed for the each animal.

 

Together we glued animals onto sticks and the shadows onto unlined white index cards. We waited awhile for the paint and glue to dry before playing our shadow game

How did we play the game?

There are probably numerous ways to play with the shadows and the puppets. We play two very simple matching games. 

The first matching game involved matching the shadows to the puppets.  We talked about how the beaver was a little like the groundhog. The beaver’s tail helped us sort out with shadow was his. The mouse and the cat were really easy to figure out. I mixed the puppets up a couple of times and my son had to rearrange the shadow cards to match the new order of the puppets. 

 

Then we took the puppets out of their stand and matched them to their shadow cards. We had fun making the puppets try to squeeze into another animals shadows. It opened up a discussion on how each shadow is unique and just what makes each shadow unique.

Later we just played with the puppets and tried making shadows on the wall. I think we will keep coming up with new ways to do this activity.—————————————————————————————————————————–Did you like this post from Deirdre? Come read more from her by connecting with her social media pages below: