Groundhog Day

Once again, my students inspired me today! We were reading this cute groundhog story, when one of my students asked, "how come he only sees his shadow sometimes?" Of course many of the other students were excited to tell him the answer to his question. :) But, I still thought it would be fun to do a little investigation anyway. I spent my lunch half eating and half making an investigation worksheet for this afternoon.

So... first, we made our own groundhog paper puppets.
Then, we asked our "essential questions", made our predictions, and went over our plan.
I originally was going to turn off all the lights and use flashlights, but it was actually sunny outside! It's pretty much cloudy from November-June here in Portland, but we were blessed with a beautiful day. So instead we went outside and tried to find our groundhog's shadows.

Some of the kids got really into it and acted out the groundhog popping out of his burrow. To compare, we went inside and turned off the lights and closed the shades. I challenged them to try to find a shadow anywhere in the room. Some of course knew they couldn't no matter what, others tried just in case, while some were determined to make a shadow. When we were all done, we discussed then completed our investigation paper.

When I got home, I enhanced it a bit with some cute font. You can get it HERE.