When young learners think about what they know about bats, often times they immediately talk about a vampire bat. So autumn is a perfect time to learn more about the critical roll bats have in the world. By the end of the week, they will learn about the many bat species and how truly making they are!
This blog post is filled with engaging activities to support reading comprehension. math and literacy centers, bat craftivities, bat poems, videos, and anchor charts too!
I am posting a variety of activities that will help you learn about bats in a fun way. Be sure to download your free printables at the end of this blog post.
This blog post also contains affiliate links, but the suggestions are my own.
Teaching about bats is so much fun! A bat unit is a perfect fall theme for your classroom whether your school celebrates Halloween. Here are some fun lesson ideas for your week (or two) of bats!
I may have a favorite bat book or two… or five.
I love teaching fun things like bats, but what’s better is when you can use those cool themes to teach reading comprehension skills, as well as, other math and literacy standards. Two of my favorite books to read while teaching about bats are Stellaluna by Janell Cannon and Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies.
Here is a brief synopsis of the book Stellaluna:
Stellaluna was flying with her mother when an owl attacked the mother bat. Stellaluna’s mother drops her, and she falls right into a bird’s nest. The family of birds takes her in, but Stellaluna does not quite fit in.
This story beautifully explores themes of friendship, identity, and acceptance. Stellaluna learns valuable lessons about staying true to her bat instincts while making friends in the avian world. It is a precious fictional story and a great way to introduce bats to your classroom.
Using the book, we practice making predictions, retelling the story, comparing, inferring, and opinion writing.
With our reading comprehension units, we sometimes ask students to make a prediction. We love that students can express themselves with illustrations and some text.
We also ask students to write an opinion. We asked them to write about their favorite part of the story.
One weekly activity with our reading comprehension units is retelling the story or working with text details. Students work together to put the story in sequential order.
You can use the printed version or display the text details on your interactive whiteboard.
Students also made their own retelling of the book Stellaluna. These were cut out of black construction paper, and a white crayon was used to make the face. Whenever possible, we like to add the retelling to a fun craft. Double fun for sure!
Students practice retelling the story with their partners. These are hands-on activities that really help to support oral language!
Lesson plans and response activities for Stellaluna can be found here:
Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies is such a fantastic book. We love it because it couples narrative text with informational text. This book is filled with bat facts and would make an excellent nonfiction text for research projects.
This is also a great mentor text for writing and word choice!
Here are a few pages so you can see what I mean. The illustrations are beautiful.
Using this story, students build their schema about bats. This bat chart serves as a graphic organizer for our learning. Students use this chart as they work on responding to the discussion prompts.
You will find the pieces to make this anchor chart in the free download file at the bottom of this blog post.
Students work to draw their own bats as they respond to the writing prompt. I love these illustrations.
Our young children continue building their schema about bats. Other lessons teach students about inferring and visualizing.
Students also connect what they know about bats and other nocturnal animals.
Lesson plans and response activities for Bat Loves the Night can be found here:
This is a fantastic book to add to your book basket during your bat activities. This all-about bats book is a great addition to your nonfiction books collection! This bat book is appropriate for both kindergarten and first grade students. We use this chart to build our vocabulary chart. You can find the pieces for this chart at the end of this blog post.
Here are a few fun bat crafts you can use in your own classroom.
During our Stellaluna lesson, students made some of these hanging bat crafts. You can see the birds in the nest, and Stellaluna is hanging upside down from the nest. You will find the directions for this fun activity and the bat template in the read aloud book companion lessons.
Materials needed for this cut bat craft:
We also have a bat directed drawing watercolor art project. Liquid watercolors are my favorite for student projects. Direct drawings are an easy way to build student confidence.
This is one of our favorite poems. We love using words like echolocation! Students love the interactive portion of the poem where they remove a bat from the bat cave.
Each poem comes with a 5 day fluency plan. We sing this poem each day, but honestly… we continue to sing it all year long. That is how much we love it! This bat song is set to the tune of Five Little Ducks.
Each poem also comes with an emergent reader. Students love to sing along and color their poem book.
Watching a few YouTube videos about bats is also a great way to learn more about these nocturnal creatures. This one has some fun facts about bats. This video explains that there are 1,300 different species of bats worldwide.
The video also explains the important role bats play as pollinators.
The smallest bat is the bumblebee bat, and the largest is the flying fox.
Here are a few fun bat-themed activities for your center time! Click on the images to find the resources.
Students match the puzzle pieces to build a word family word. Then, they record the word on the worksheet.
This is a simple no prep bat printable that is also included.
In this center, students stamp the life of cycle of a bat.
In this center, kindergarten students color the letters to match the color on the bat letters. Coloring is a great way to strengthen fine motor skills.
Here are a few of my favorite bat activities for math.
in these different sets of bat printables, you will find a simple number sense activity and an addition activity.
Here is another kindergarten bat activity for math centers using dice. In this fun math activity, students will roll two dice and add the numbers together.
I have saved the best for last! Check out these adorable bat snack ideas. When it comes to classroom snacks, you want them to be easy!
These cute bats look easy peasy
I hope you have a few fun ideas you can use for your bat week of fun! The month of October is the perfect time of the year to dive into a cross-curricular study of bats.
You can find other nonfiction and science unit blog posts for fall by clicking:
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My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
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2 Responses
Hi Deedee, Is there still anyway we can get your peek at my week PDF lesson plans with hyperlinks. When I click on it, it wants to pin it to pintrest.
Hi there! YES! You I fixed the links so they are easier to get to. 🙂