Shadow Play with Painted Hearts

One of my favorite parts about doing STEAM activities with my children is it makes learning fun and engaging and becomes valued family time for everyone.

How else can you play, paint, learn and create a family keepsake?

We used playing with shadows to create a collaborative work of art….even Baby Jellybean (who really isn’t a baby anymore she is almost 2) was able to participate.

This best part… this activity took under 5 minutes to set up.

SHADOW PLAY WITH HEARTS

We have played with shadows before with our Superhero Signals but this time, we took it a step further. I challenged Lil B (6) and M-Woww (4) to not only create a heart shape shadow but also make the shadows grow bigger and smaller.

Read below for our full tutorial.

Materials: Paper Heart, Flashlight, Pencil, Poster board or Banner paper, Painter’s tape

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Adult Prep: Hang a large sheet of paper or posterboard on the wall.

I cut a sheet of banner paper and hung it on the wall using painter’s tape. Be sure to use painter’s tape to avoid peeling the paint off your wall.

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Step 1: Fold a piece of paper and draw a half of heart along the folded edge. Cut out your heart.

Step 2: Let your child experiment using the flashlight to create a shadow of the heart on the wall or paper.

Step 3: Once your child has had time to experiment with the light, challenge your child to make the heart’s shadow grow bigger on the wall.  Let your child figure out they need to move further away to increase the heart’s shadow size.

Challenge your child to create a smaller size heart shadow.

Step 4: With a partner, have one person hold the flashlight and heart while the second person uses a pencil to trace the heart’s shadow on the paper. Repeat and change jobs.

Step 5: Once you have your different size heart shadows drawn on the paper add your color. We chose to paint our hearts but you could color with crayon or marker as well.

Toddler Bonus:

Keep your younger child busy by painting a background for the hearts. Here is Jellybean using washable paint and foam rollers from the dollar store on a poster board to create our background.

Here is our final work of art:

We cut out the painted hearts once they had dried and glued it to Jellybean’s background.

The collaborative work of art is now hanging in our kitchen for everyone to admire.

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This post is part of our Creative Preschool series. Hop over to our Creative Preschool friends for more heart inspired activities.

 | Artsy Momma

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