If you’ve been around here for awhile, you’ve probably come across my Bat Cave Day Classroom Transformation. It is one of my absolute favorite days in my classroom. My first graders get so excited and talk about it for the rest of the school year.
One of the questions that I am usually asked is, “What all do you do during your Bat Cave Day?” Well, I am a huge believer in making learning fun, but meaningful. Even though it is a fun day, I still want to jam-pack it with learning. This year, I wanted to add in even more reading, math, and writing based activities into our Bat Cave Day, so I created this Bat Cave Day activity packet.
During our Bat Cave Day, my students bring in flashlights from home, and we work in the dark all day. They love this extra bit of excitement. Throughout the day, they will be completing six bat-themed centers. (Batty Math, Spin & Add, Bat Writing, Batty Vowels, Roll to Color Short Vowels, and Fact or Fiction)
I really based these centers around skills that my first graders are currently working on or need to review. This allows us to continue our academic learning, even though we are adding some extra excitement to our day.
My students will be rotating in groups of 3-4 students to complete each of these centers. Afterwards, we will complete some of the other activities in this packet including ABC order, vocabulary practice, writing, and more.
For the actual classroom transformation, I keep it pretty simple. I purchase black tablecloths from Dollar Tree to place on our tables and in front of our classroom windows. I also have some plastic bats that I purchased years ago from Dollar Tree that I use every year. You can see everything that I use for my transformation in my Amazon store. I promise you that you really do not need to spend a lot of money. The ONLY thing I buy for this each year are the tablecloths, and honestly, if I just purchased cloth ones, I could actually reuse those every year as well.
If you’d like to check out the Bat Cave Day packet, click on the picture below.
Read more about our Bat Cave Classroom Transformation here.
Remember to pin the image below to save for future reference.
My students love figuring out ways to make the gears move.
I decorated my classroom the night before with some items that I picked up at Dollar Tree and Deans Party Mania, which is basically our version of Party City.
I covered each of the desks and tables with white tablecloths and then spread plastic, from the paint section, on the floor to represent ice floes. I also picked up some snowflake confetti and sparkly plastic confetti to sprinkle on the tables.
I attached snowflake décor to my lanterns that I have hanging from my ceiling.
For my door, I taped on a light blue table cloth and decorated it with snowflakes from the party store. I also found this sparkly door decoration at Dollar Tree.
I hung up a light blue table cloth on our dry erase board and attached this felt icicle decoration along the top.
I gave each student a bottle of “melted snow” to have for the day. You can download the water bottle cover 
I purchased the larger marshmallows for this activity. The students could work together or on their own to create igloos with the marshmallows.
While the students were working at their stations, I had one student at a time come to me to complete the Blubber Experiment. I placed vegetable shortening in a large bag. The student put on a latex glove and placed their hand in the shortening. Then, they placed their hand in ice water to demonstrate how blubber keeps arctic animals warm.
Later on in the day, we had a snowball throwing contest. I gave each students a cotton ball. They each took turns throwing the ball and then measuring how far they threw it.
Since we have been learning about place value and how to use Base-10 blocks, I incorporated that into our day. I gave students straws and marshmallows. These became icicles and snowballs. The students had to make numbers with their icicles and snowballs just like they would with Base-10 blocks.
We practiced spelling words and math facts with shaving cream (snow) on our desks.
We also used passages from my new 
I remembered at the last minute that I had this 
We read the article together and discussed the things we learned. Then, I had the students highlight anything new that they learned from the article. They loved going back into the text to look for new knowledge.
We reread the article and discussed the main idea and key details in the text. This particular article was perfect for this nonfiction skill. I had the students come up and place a Post-It note on each part.
This gave them a perfect visual of this comprehension skill.
I have to admit, I was a little worried about this at first. I explained over and over again that they needed to work together and plan out their charts. I tried to explain to my students that they did not want to just start cutting and gluing. They would have to come up with a plan as to where to place things before they glued everything down.
I eventually just let go of the control of wanting a “pretty” anchor chart and allowed them to plan and learn from their mistakes. I was SO pleasantly surprised!
Their end results were amazing. We only had one group that accidently threw away two of their text feature labels, so they left them off of the chart. One group out of 5…I call that success.
Scholastic believes that students learn when educational topics are meaningful to them. That’s why each Scholastic Classroom Magazine takes a specific subject like math or language arts and uses captivating photos, informative writing, and impressive online features to make it relevant and engaging to every student. Not only do students love Scholastic Magazines, teachers love using them in their classrooms because they provide invaluable instructional materials that meet current academic standards that prepare students for state tests.