My youngest and I just finished up our bat unit just in time for Halloween.  It was one of my favorite units to teach.  I have a strange fascination with bats and love teaching my girls about them.  We started off our week with this adorable poem.

I chose it because it reinforced number words as well as taught a little subtraction.  I made 5 tiny bats for Molly to act out the poem with in her pocket chart.  Then I printed a copy of it for her poetry notebook.  We highlighted the number words in yellow and all the sight words she knew in pink.

Before reading any books I wanted to see what she knew about bats already.  I made this graphic organizer and used post it notes to write what she said.  I love using can – have – are organizers because it includes, in a simple way, so much information.

As we read books throughout the week, Molly added post it notes to her chart.  Her three favorite bat books that we read this week included; Bats by Gail Gibbons, Stellaluna, and Hello, Bumblebee Bat.

After reading Stellaluna, we compared bats and birds.  I found this great activity here.  She loved cutting out the different facts and sorting them in the right circle.  It was a great introduction to Venn Diagrams as well.  Then she had to write one fact about a bat and one about a bird.  I was surprised with some of the vocabulary that she already knew.

We watched the cutest video that explained echolocation over and over.  I’ve been singing it all week!!  Molly loved the book Stellaluna so much that she wanted to read it again.  I found an audio version online that she listened to and then we completed a story map together.  Again, I used post it notes so I could reuse the chart paper.

While I was teaching the other two girls, I found a Wild Kratts episode on bats for her to watch.   If you aren’t familiar with Wild Kratts, it’s an amazing show that teaches kids all about different kinds of animals.  All three of my girls love it!

For art, we sponge painted bats flying into the sunset.  She taped two bat patterns on her paper and then sponge painted all around them.  She loved when I took the patterns off and she saw the black bats.

Some of Molly’s centers this week included, labeling a bat, drawing a bat following step by step directions, and measuring different sized wingspans.  Although her favorite was a making words activity that I made.  I had some laminated bat patterns that a friend had given me that I wrote a beginning letter on one wing and an ending letter on the other wing.  The bat face I wrote different vowels on.  We reviewed what vowels were and their sounds.  Then she had to put the vowels on the bats to make different words.  She loved it and did a great job sounding them out.