What is the Shadow?

The shadow is what you see when light can't reach something because something else is in the way.

Imagine it's a sunny day, and you're playing outside. You have a ball, and it's blocking some of the sunlight. The part of the ground where the sunlight doesn’t reach becomes darker, that’s your shadow! It looks like a dark copy of you or your ball, following you wherever you go.

Light comes from a source, like the sun or a lamp. When light hits something, it can either pass through it (like through glass), bounce off it (like when it hits a wall), or get blocked by it (like when it hits your ball).

If something blocks the light completely, and there's nothing to catch the light on the other side, you see a shadow, a dark shape where the light couldn’t go.

If you move closer to the light source, your shadow gets bigger. If you move farther away, it gets smaller. It’s like when you’re standing close to a lamp and your shadow is huge on the wall, but when you walk back, your shadow shrinks, just like magic, but not really!