Saturday, February 2, 2013

Going Batty!

I laughed as I wrote the title for this blog post. Lately, I have felt that my kids have been driving me a little batty. I just wanted to share with you a short unit that we did about bats inspired by an amazing co-op teacher. As we started this new year after the break I felt that we should really take a week to do a unit related to the class my son was taking called Animal Safari. Since my son showed an interest in bats, that is were we headed on our voyage. The wonderful world of bats! The links to all the places I found most of these sheets will be found at the end of this post.


First we started by reading a non fiction book about bats and made a can, have, and are chart about bats from the book, National Geographic for Kids: Bats. After that we did a small activity were we had to cut out 600 mosquitoes and glue groups of 100 on paper plates. Side note it works best if the mosquitoes are cut out in groups of 100 and then glued on a paper plate. We learned that a bat can eat up to 600 bugs in one hour. During the week we also learned about the wingspans of the smallest and largest bats in the world. We used string to measure and show the difference between the wingspan of the Bumblebee Bat (5 inches) and the Flying Fox bat (6 feet).

After that we read many other non- fiction books about bats. We then read Stellaluna, we compared this book with the non fiction books and talked about why this book would be considered fiction. With this book you can also make a Venn diagram and compare bats with birds. 


During the beginning of the week I gave my son the poem Batty by Shel Silverstein.  At the end of the week we drew a picture of a bat and labeled the different body parts (my son's picture came out way better than mine :). After he was done with his picture he used all the facts we had learned during the week and wrote an informative paper about bats. My son is in first grade and sometimes most of the time writing is not something he looks forward to doing. But it  helped that we had written a lot of the facts down already so the writing the paper did not seem so challenging by the end of the week. Thank you for visiting!  If you have ny questions feel free to leave a comment.

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