Creative Science Workshop
age: 5yrs plus
This creative science workshop explores the qualities of light, shadows, colour and translucency.
Children made two different kinds of shadow puppets – older children created black silhouette jungle creatures with jointed parts, and younger children made more simple colourful creatures such as flying butterflies or swimming jellyfish. The Brazilian jungle theme was liberally interpreted. They made butterflies, jellyfish, snails, piranha, exotic birds, a toucan, bears of various kinds, koala bear, polar bear, snakes, lizards/dinosaurs, a salamader, and a fantasy rock monster.
I set up a long table top light screen for displaying the shadow puppets. Materials and tools included plenty of ready-made shadow puppet sticks, thin black card, decorative translucent paper, sequin strip, furry craft stems, and colourful feathers. Plus drawing, cutting, and hole making tools. Glue sticks, staplers, brass paper fasteners, and velcro were used for joining different kinds of materials together.
We ran this as an all day drop-in workshop for Flipside Lowestoft Festival at half term (24th October 2017) in Suffolk. 35 children of all ages took part.
Here are a few photos from the event:
making ideas blog 
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