Most of the kinds of mammals in the world are bats — they’re actually the largest group of species in the world, with 1,000 different species living on all the continents except Antarctica. We’re lucky we have them, too, since they eat insects.
Online resources:
- Bats: Creatures of the Night
- Bat crossword includes lots of good vocabulary.
- Thinkquest for Stellaluna guides kids through a research project based on Janell Canon’s Stellaluna.
- Bat Conservation International
- Scholastic’s All About Bats
- AVKids Bats includes hands-on science experiences at several levels.
- Bat Math at Mathwire
Activities:
- Remember making chains of paper dolls by folding paper and cutting out people with their hands touching the edge of the paper? You can do the same with bats! Fold the paper, draw the bat (we traced around a cookie cutter) and cut, making sure not to cut the edges. You end up with a nice garland of bats. We used black tissue paper for a nice drape.
- Use a Venn diagram to compare bats with birds, and with mice or rats.
- Crayola has a fun art project about what bats eat, using Model Magic .
- Paint black or brown paint onto kids’ hands and have them put their hands down on paper carefully with thumbs together. Turn the paper over to see a nice bat print.
- Make an origami bat.
Some of our favorite bat books:
- Stellaluna
- Time For Kids: Bats!
- Gail Gibbons’s Bats
- Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats
- Bats Thematic Unit from TCR uses Stellaluna and Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats as literature connections, and has lots of activities across the curriculum.
- Bat Loves the Night
- Bat Jamboree Don’t miss the triangular number pattern in this one as the bats arrange themselves from 10 bats on the bottom to 1 bat on top. The folks at Mathwire brought it to my attention.
