Children work in pairs to make combined shadows and go for a walk, looking for shadows that fall on multiple surfaces.
Let’s go outside to make and find cool shadows!
Our shadows are combining!
Materials
- Cool Shadows tool in the digital Shadows Journal on each iPad (one per adult)
Preparation
- Visit your outdoor play area or another safe outdoor location at different times of day to preview the shadows that can be seen and determine where your children can best see their own shadows. If your school has a lot of surrounding buildings, note when the sun is most visible in order to create the clearest shadows.
- Scout out a safe walking route (perhaps just circling the school building) where children will be able to see their shadows on a variety of surfaces: benches, stairs, walls, grass, fences.
- Familiarize yourself with the motions and explorations in the song “Little Shadow, Dance with Me” (sung to the tune of “Skip to My Lou”), in the book Guess Whose Shadow?, and in the video Outdoor Shadows.
- Safety Alert: Each time you go outside, remind children to never look at the sun because it can harm their eyes.
Directions: Lesson 3
Outdoors
- You may want each classroom adult to have an iPad so Cool Shadows entries are recorded on more than one device. Over the course of Week 1, each child should create at least one Cool Shadows entry.
- Capture outdoor shadows with the Cool Shadows tool. On a sunny day, head outside to a safe place to explore making combined shadows. Review how overlapping objects will make one combined shadow.
- You might have children try out some of the shadow activities demonstrated in the video Outdoor Shadows.
- Can two children make their shadows walk through each other?
- Take children to the safe outdoor location. Have two children work together to make a shadow with four arms. How many shadows do you see? Why are there more children than shadows?
- Invite children to explore other shadow shapes they can make by posing their bodies in different ways. They might recreate a shadow from the “Little Shadow, Dance with Me” song or the Guess Whose Shadow? book or create a new shadow shape. Tell children, When you make a really interesting shadow, let me know and I can take a picture.
- Help children use the Cool Shadows tool to photograph some of these shadows. Enlist the help of children as photographers!
- Engage children in conversation about the shadow photos. Possible discussion ideas:
- Tell me about this shadow.
- Whose shadow is this? How did you make this shadow?
- What do you notice about this shadow? What makes it really interesting?
- Take a shadow walk around the walking route. Is there a slotted, wavy, or stepped surface (e.g., fence, wall, bench, or stairs) where children’s shadows appear distorted across more than one surface? Talk about what shadows look like when they appear on these surfaces. Help children use the Cool Shadows photo tool to record their observations of the interesting shadows they find.
The photos taken during this activity can be reviewed and discussed by children during the Learning Center Cool Shadows Review activity.
