Fionúir: What is shadow

What is shadow?

Have you ever wondered where your shadow comes     from? Well, it doesn’t just pop out of your body, you hopefully know! Please do read on for more …

If you go for a walk on a sunny summer’s day and the

sun is shining beautifully behind you, you can see your shady shadow. Why? Because light only travels in straight lines. It cannot bend around you so it goes past you!!! You block the light. See picture for examples.

Children and their shadows

To make it easier to understand, you can say that anything that the Sun can’t shine through has a shadow. For examples, bicycles, trees, buildings.

But light can partly shine through things like paper, clear glass, some light plastics. Shadow is always black

because the object absorbs the light.

Night and Day

The Sun can just light up one half of the Earth at a time. 

As we already know the Earth spins around once every 24 hours. It is not still! Therefore on one side it is day-time and on the other side it is night-time. Please see picture for examples.

Day and night

An example would be if your friend lives in America and you live in Germany and when you are at school working hard she or he is fast asleep in Noddyland having delightful dreams.

Our last teacher, Ms Howe is now sleeping lik

e a baby;=). 

She lives in Perth, Australia. 

Shadow Fun Activities

Shadow puppets

Try this out and have lots of fun!

It is easy to make your own puppet show.

You will need the following items:

a flat, light coloured wall

a torch

your hands

1. Shine the light on the wall.

2. Put your hand in front of the light and move it forwards until your hand makes a clear and  shadow.    

3.  Move your nimble little fingers into different shapes to look like animals.

Hope you all had 

fun trying out this simple little experiment to demonstrate shadows.

Thank you for reading my bit on shadows.

Cheers Fionúir