During third term at our kindergarten we run a program called “Star of the Week” where each child is a star for a week. They wear a star badge, have a special chair to sit in, have first choice at activities, talk all about themselves, do their favourite activity with a small group of children helped by one of their parents, and so on.

One of the highlights is that Donna draws around the shadow of their faces and cuts their silhouettes out of black paper. These are then mounted on coloured card of their choice, laminated and placed around the room for all to see and admire.

The interest shown by the children in how shadows are made, led onto the following activity.

shadows in the winter sun

We had been experiencing some quite miserable weather here in Melbourne, hence the mud play. One day, a weak, winter sun came out, enough to cast shadows on the ground.

We asked one of our children to make an interesting body shape and we drew around him.

Then he lay down on the shadow and the children could see how elongated it was compared to his actual size thanks to that low morning winter sun!

When the children came inside, some of them grabbed various objects from around the room and popped them onto the mat in a sunny spot to see what shadows they made as well.

This led to lots of experimentation from the children inside and out.

Outside they enjoyed drawing around each other’s shadows …

…as well as different play equipment.

We asked our young friend to stand in the same spot just before lunch time and again drew around his shadow. It was fascinating to see how far the sun had moved and what direction it went in just a few hours. His shadow had shortened considerably too, although it was still bigger than he was.

Over the next week or so this really took off and an exciting thing we found was that the children (generally a small group of boys) who are not usually interested in picking up a pencil or paint were doing all sorts of wonderful chalk drawings on the concrete!