Bats {Freebie Investigations}

If you teach primary grades in October, you know it's a busy month.  We have many topics that thematically are exciting for the kids.  However, finding a 30 minute block of time between required subjects and pacing guides can be a tight squeeze.

October starts with fire safety and pumpkins. If you toss in bats, owls, spiders or even nocturnal animals, you are narrowing the timeline.  How about Red Ribbon Week? As the month comes to a close it's all things witches, monsters, ghost and goblins ...And that's to say, if your timeline is like mine with the 50th day of school then the squeeze is definitely real.  Even though it's a busy month, it's also one of the most engaging and exciting months to teach.  Our students are acclimated to our classroom setting, rituals, and routines.  They're gaining confidence and willing to read and write on these exciting topics. This week I will squeeze a few themed lessons in for bats during our reading and/or science block.

 Last year my kids worked on the following activities and gushed about them.  Here's a peek of the freebie file...

Students collaborate in six different groups cutting 100 mosquitos each for a classroom display.  You can hear the collective sigh when the kids see how many mosquitos a bat can eat in an hour.  It's a powerful display!

These are the two stories I used during the week to compare fiction and non fiction.  There are many other texts but these are personally my favorite!

Here are a few charts and a reproducible that I used with my class after reading Stellaluna and Fly Guy Bats.

We created our first diagram.  I bought a bat skeleton from Target for very cheap and a human skeleton from The Dollar Tree. We held the two and compared them.  Then we worked to identify the bones.

Oscar and the Bat is a perfect book to expose students to sound and discuss echolocation.  The kids are truly amazed by the sounds they hear once they complete the hands on investigation.  The rest of the kids are sitting watching the reaction waiting to know what is being heard.  This little nugget said it's like "Star Wars" his my ears.  LOL.

As my little nugget wrote in his response, the momma bats can find their pups by scent.  For this investigation,  I poured drops of different extract scents on cotton balls and passed them out to the class.  We have class numbers so I secretly placed them on the cup.  While they were working on a task, I placed a cotton ball on their desk so they never saw the numbers.  I also wrote a letter on the bottom of the cup and on the matching bottle of extract so I knew what student had each of the different scents.  The kids had to use their sense of smell to find their bat family.

If you are interested in this freebie file, click the cover image above and it will take you to the file.  I hope you enjoy it as much as my kiddos did!