Happy Almost Groundhog’s Day everyone! To celebrate we went outside this afternoon to enjoy the 80 degree weather and do a little shadow measurement (before the high pollen levels completely overtook us!)
Earlier while the kids were busy playing I printed out this cute little guy and got out the sidewalk chalk. Gotta love activities with only 2 supplies!
We went outback and the kids took turns standing in the sun while we traced and colored in their shadows.
Then we did a little non-standard measurement! Which is just fancy teacher-speak for “we used our groundhog friend to measure how tall the shadow was in groundhogs.” This is a great early math activity for young kids because not only does it help them begin to understand complex math concepts, but it’s also tons of fun!
My 3 year old’s shadow was 15 groundhogs tall.
Then we moved closer to the fence where there wasn’t as much light to see what that would do to our shadows…and found out his shrunk from 15 to 1.5 groundhogs tall. The big kids hypothesized that your shadow is bigger when there is more sun. We’ll have to do this again at noon someday to so they can see what happens then.
Then we measured how tall we were in groundhogs!
In case you were wondering my 3 year old is 10 groundhogs tall…Do you know how many groundhogs you are?
Has anyone else done any fun Groundshog’s Day activities? I’d love to try something new tomorrow!
Megan says
February 11, 2012 at 11:36 pmI’m glad you enjoyed it!