Engaging and Integrating: Bats

Interested in what happened inside our bat cave? You're in the right place! 

If you missed how I transformed my room into a bat cave last week, you've got to visit my post HERE.

All week long, we integrated science, reading and math.

Here are just a few of the activities we focused on.

I had the kids bring flashlights and we worked with the lights off the majority of the time.

We had read a little bit about bats and already had some schema about them. Find that lesson HERE.

Before reading more non-fiction about bats, we recorded our schema on sticky notes and shared on a chart.

While I was reading, they had to write down a new fact. We shared our new learning & put it on our chart also.

During our bat snack (cheese balls from Sam's in a batty bag), we made hanging bats.

We used this can/have/are chart and recorded them in the squares.

They cut them apart and glued the facts to string hanging from the bat template.

During science, we labeled the parts of a bat.

Students had to draw their own bat the next day and label the parts.

FUN TWIST: tape their drawings under their desk and let them work "upside down" like bats!!!

We conducted 2 experiments. The first was an echolocation experiment.

This is a darling video/song we watched and got stuck in our heads.

All you will need is 2 toilet paper rolls and a tin pie pan.

Student 1 will hold the pie pan. Student 2 will be the speaker and Student 3 the listener.  Have Student 2 speak through the toilet paper roll. The sound will bounce off of the pie pan and will travel through Student 3's toilet paper roll to their ear. This simulates how sound travels for bats. It hits the object and bounces back to the bat informing them how far the object is away. Each student had the chance to experience and be each of the 3 parts. 

Bat mothers have a very good sense of smell and the ability to tell which baby is theirs out of hundreds of bat babies. You will need cotton balls and several different oils for this experiment.

Each student will be a "mother bat" who is looking for her baby by smell. Give each one a cotton ball with a dab of oil on it (I used peppermint, thieves, orange, lemon). Have a plate with cotton balls with each oil on them and have the students sniff the cotton balls to find their "baby". 

During this week in math we had been discussing 2D shapes. I came across this activity where students had to put shapes together to make a bat. I made it a little more challenging for my kiddos...I took away the example picture on the handout and made them think, shocker! They found it fun!

We finished off the week reading Stellaluna. We discussed the plot of the story and used Smitten with First's plot activity to go along with the book. 

It was such a fun week and I can just imagine the disappointment when they walk in tomorrow and the bat cave is gone. Time to start thinking of ideas for another room transformation!