Shadows and light

Spring is in the air!! Well, at least that is what Groundhog Phil says. Early Spring! And, in honor of  him, we talked about light and shadows this week. We even had a miniature version of him, (and her!), to project shadows of them with our flashlights. 

We talked about how groundhogs burrow to find a place to hibernate through the winter. We used our groundhogs and sand to burrow and hide.

We used our overhead this week to project shadows of different objects onto the wall. We hid our objects and took turns guessing them by looking at their shadows.

We also had flashlights, prisms, kaleidoscopes, and objects at this center for free play discovery! We not only talked about shadows this week, but also reflecting and refracting light  The kids were so impressed when they saw a rainbow appear using the prisms and flashlights. 

For a math center, we used our overhead and our bean manipulatives. The kids wrote a number on the overhead (backwards is better than not at all, right) and then counted that many beans and put them on the overhead so that they could see the projection on the wall and double-check their work by counting the shadows.

We had fun with these shoe box shadow boxes this week! We had different miniature animals that we put into our shadow box, and we took turns telling a story about our animals while our friends tried to guess the animal.

We practiced forming our lowercase alphabet by "shadowing" each letter with our wiki stix. They are a string covered in wax, so when you press on them, they stick to the letters and stay in place. These over sized letters from Lakeshore Learning are perfect for this because they show us the correct way to form our letters.

This memory game was perfect for our shadows week.  We matched each shape (in yellow) to its shadow in black.

And, we matched our lowercase alphabet to our uppercase alphabet with our lowercase alphabet boards, and our uppercase alphabet letters.

We each had some computer time this week playing shadow games. We had to drag the shadow to its match.

And, we also used our counting boards to match our numbers to their corresponding pictures.

Along with light and shadows, we also touched upon mirror images this week. We had fun cutting out shapes with 2 colors of construction paper to form our mirror image pictures. This was also great scissor practice!

Book of the week: Guess Whose Shadow by Stephen Swinburne

Words of the week: Hog and Dig

Song of the week: Do As I'm Doing

Star of the week:

We enjoyed learning about our star this week!

Bruce!!

and....

We celebrated a birthday!

Happy Birthday Madison!!!