Shadow friends

From the house

• A flashlight or phone light
• A bare wall
• A few toys

How to play

1. Turn off the big light and shine the flashlight at the wall.
2. Hold up a toy. Can they find its shadow?
3. Move the toy close to the light (big shadow), then far away (small shadow).
4. Make hand shadows together: a bird, a dog, a waving hand.

Fit it to your child

• Easier: Skip the sizes and play peekaboo, moving the toy in and out of the light: “There it is.”
• Harder: Before you switch the light on, they guess where the shadow will land, then try to make a toy’s shadow taller than you.

Words to use

• shadow
• light
• dark
• big
• small

Why it helps

Light travels in straight lines, so a shadow forms wherever the toy blocks it, and moving the toy to change the shadow is a real experiment.