Shadow Art

As our ongoing exploration of different ways to tell stories, students in Grade 2 were challenged to use shadows to recreate scenes from a picture book. Armed with a plan, a platform, and a flashlight, everyone filed into the dark theater. Using cut-outs of key objects from the book (designed and cut on the Cricut paper cutting machines in the Kol-lab), students had to fiddle with where to place the objects to create the desired scene. All the cut-outs were the same height, which meant that objects could not simply be placed in a line the same distance from the wall. For example, the groups working with the story, "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus," by Mo Willems, had to arrange the pieces in such a way that the pigeon appeared smaller than the bus (or go crazy with perspective and make it look like the pigeon could eat the whole bus in one bite). By trying different distances between the light source and the objects and the wall, and by adjusting the angle of the light source, new scenes took shape.