Make a groundhog craft with your students. Provide children with pieces of green construction paper and instruct them to cut fringes at the top. Wrap the paper around an empty toilet paper roll so that the fringes are sticking up over the edge of the roll, creating the look of grass. Print out and photocopy images of a groundhog's head. Distribute the groundhog images to children and instruct them to color the heads brown and cut them out. Paste the groundhog head onto the end of a craft stick. Insert the stick into the toilet paper tube. Children can push the stick up and pull it back down to make it look as if the groundhog is appearing out of its hole.
Have children try to identify objects based on their shadows with this activity. Gather a collection of items to use for the activity; items to consider include an apple, a pencil, a stuffed animal and a block. Tape pieces of poster board around the edges of an overhead projector, creating a barrier so that children can't see the surface of the projector. Turn off the lights in the classroom, place one of the objects on the projector and see if children can determine what the shadow belongs to.
Have your students create silhouettes of themselves. Tape a piece of black construction paper on the wall and have a child stand in front of it. Have another child shine a flashlight on the person standing in front of the paper and another person trace the shadow that is created on the paper with a piece of white chalk. Remove the black paper from the wall and have the model cut out his silhouette. Display each students' silhouette in the classroom and see if children can identify who the silhouettes belong to.
Incorporate a math lesson into your Groundhog Day celebration. The day before Groundhog Day, have students predict whether or not the critter will see his shadow. Create a bar graph on a piece of chart paper to record the results -- write "yes" and "no" at the bottom of the paper and numbers along the side of the paper. Draw a bar above the "yes" and "no" that is as tall as the number of students who predicted each option. Read the graph with your class to determine how many more students think one option than the other. On Groundhog Day, reveal whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow and discuss how many of the predictions were correct and how many were incorrect.