Miss Mace’s kindergarten class brought Groundhog Day to life with a hands-on lesson that blended science, movement, and math in the most engaging way. Students explored how light interacts with objects by tracing one another’s silhouettes in chalk on the blacktop. As the day went on, they revisited their tracings and discovered how shadows change in length and direction as the sun moves across the sky—an early and exciting introduction to Earth’s rotation.
The learning did not stop there. The class jumped into a lively game of shadow tag, turning science into motion while building cardiovascular endurance and strengthening gross motor skills such as agility, coordination, and spatial awareness. Students learned to track movement and adjust their bodies as shadows shifted with the light source.
To wrap up the celebration, math and literacy took center stage. Students made predictions about whether Punxsutawney Phil would see his shadow and recorded their votes on a class graph. They then used the data to count, compare, and interpret results—proving that even kindergartners can think like scientists and mathematicians while having a whole lot of fun.
