Exploring Shadow Puppets with Laura Numeroff

A fun way to explore making shadows with kids.

You can do this with almost any animal figure or item and make shadows on the walls.

A fun way to see how light close and far affect shadows.

The Exploring Shadow Puppets is a great addition to the groundhog day activities on the site.

What is a shadow?

A shadow is a dark area where light from a light source is blocked by an object.

Making Shadow on the Wall

This is a fun activity to make shadows with kids. You can see how figure can make shadows on the wall with light.

Book: If You Give a Moose a Muffin and Author Laura Numeroff

The author is Laura Numeroff. We have been having fun reading each of the books that we have in the house.

We picked If You Give a Moose a Muffin for our book to do an activity.

We did a repeat of something we had done over the winter break. We had done some shadow puppets with Safari Ltd. They saw the part of the book that had the puppet show and wanted to do the shadows on the walls and have shadow puppets.

What you need: for the Shadow Puppets Activity

• Safari Ltd figures or any other figure that stands
• small table
• flashlight
• blank wall

Making Shadow On the Wall with Animals

We had been playing with the new Safari Ltd figures. We were taking pictures of them in groups with new and old. It was a lot of fun. They had all cats, reptiles, farm, and various other themes. We had a fun time of it. During this play and taking the pictures, the girls noticed shadows on the wall from the flash. Our play turned into doing shadows.

We grouped the figures together for the shadows we wanted to make.

Single Animal Shadow

We set up the table and got a flashlight. We shined the light on the figure and took pictures.

You can see the figure and the shadow it makes on the wall.

Animal Shadow Scenes

We started by setting up simple scenes for the play. It was load of fun. You can see some of the shadow play from our time. We did this over several nights.

You can make an group of animals or figure you want. It is fun to see and explore how the shadows look on the wall.

Each group made a different set of shadows.

You can never know what fun you will have. We did a few with ponies and dinosaurs as well this last time. It was lots of fun to make our own shadow theater.

This would also be a fun activity to do with groundhog day!

What kind of puppet show would you do?

More Shadow Activities

Groundhog Day Pack has tons of activities that are great for PreK through 3rd grade. There are groundhog recording sheets and other fun activities to do.

Groundhog Shadow Painting is a fun sunrise shadow painting with a cookie cutter. Plus suggestions for doing with different ages.

Exploring Shadow Painting is loads of fun for kids to do. We had fun when we did this. This is a fun way to explore shadows!

Check out all the fun Groundhog Day Printables & Activities on 3 Dinosaurs.

Cassie – 3Dinosaurs.com