Groundhog Shadows

Is it sunny where you are?  After weeks and weeks of cold...bone-chilling...brrrrr...cold, and dark dismal days, Groundhog Day beamed beautiful sunny skies, beautiful Nevada blue.  That darn groundhog saw his shadow and now we will have 6 more weeks of winter.  Here is our little Groundhog checking out the weather Saturday.

Today we voted on a name for our groundhog.  Sarah won (I have 10 boy to 16 girl ratio in my class).  Oh you should have seen some of the tears and tantrums from a few of the boys.  Lessons in democracy can be so tough.  We now get to report the name and our groundhog's prediction to Project Groundhog and begin keeping track of the weather. 

To celebrate (luckily) we traced and watched our shadows all day.  We started out first thing in the morning tracing the shadows of two students.

Then we traced again at morning recess.

Then after lunch.

And finally at our last recess.  Everyone was sure our shadow would continue to shrink....SURPRISE!!  I love how excited they get when they discover something new.

Actually not true...just for good measure we traced one more time as we were walking out at the end of the day.  Oops...didn't have my camera that time.  Too bad because we got to see how really tall it got, everyone was amazed.  That will have to be a ChitChat topic tomorrow.

Loving literature and poetry I had to share My Shadow by Robert Lewis Stevenson.  After watching the second tracing they got the lines about shooting up like an India rubber ball and not growing like proper children.  I think we may try drawing shadows tomorrow.  Today we made cute little paper plate "stages" and groundhog puppets complete with shadows, sang with Harry Kindergarten, and decided that the groundhog was wrong.  Spring really must be coming soon.