Over the span of 4 weeks, students from 3rd to 5th grade had the opportunity to learn with our student teacher, Emily. During her time with us, she taught a science unit on shadows! This unit was equally as exciting and difficult with the challenges presented to us in the world with distance learning. We started the unit out by discussing how it would work through zoom, google classroom, and email. Students were incredibly responsive to this and we quickly got to work! Students were assigned weekly labs and videos to do in time for the next meeting time. They started out by exploring shadows and how they change by completing an activity that required them to observe the movement of shadows by measuring the shadow of an object of their choice over the span of a few hours. Their response to this was awesome!

As the unit continued, students explored shadows in other ways. One way was by exploring sundials. Emily  had set up a video with questions for the students to watch and report back on. During this time, Jiyong and his family took the opportunity to expand on the sundial that we all know and teach us about the Korean sundial. This was quite a treat, we were so engaged learning about other cultures use of shadows!

Students also used themselves to learn! We wrapped up the unit by learning shadow puppets by watching a professional shadow puppet creator named Hans Davis. After watching him, students were challenged to make shadow puppets of their very own. Their videos were incredibly creative! We had everything from birds and dogs to entire productions!