Build & Trace Haunted House Shadows

 Add a hint of the spook-factor to your building block play with this fun shadow tracing activity.

We were kindly gifted this Blocks Rock! game. Blocks Rock! is currently on sale for $39.99 on their website and on Amazon. All opinions and images are our own and completely genuine.

With Halloween fast approaching my kids are talking about all things spooky. They have been particularly discussing haunted houses and trying to turn their bedroom into one. That gave me the idea to enjoy a fun STEM project focused on building a haunted house with blocks.

We waited for a glorious sunny day and got a tray of supplies ready. We only needed a few basic supplies- a large piece of white paper taped to the table, some markers and building blocks (we used our Blocks Rock! blocks). Oh and one more key ingredient... sunlight!

The first part of this challenge was to simply use the blocks to build a haunted house. My 3 year old loved this task and got straight to work testing out different styles of haunted house.

I actually had quite a bit of fun joining in with this activity too and built a haunted house next my little one's. As we built we would show each other the shadows that our houses were creating on the paper. My little one thought it was lots of fun to keep adding and taking away the blocks to make the shadow change.

The next stage of the activity was to trace the outline of the shadow. I put out a fun selection of spooky colored markers and showed my preschooler how to trace around the shadow by demonstrating using my haunted house. Of course she had other ideas and wanted to elaborate and add more to her design, which I thought was an awesome idea. She added spooky spikes and even said each house needed a ghost to live in it.

It was great to see how a simple building block prompt led to so much creativity and conversation. She was really intrigued as to how the shadows were made and loved being able to block the light and then move to reveal the haunted shadow. A perfect combination of engineering and art!