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.
They were all so unique!
In the first tub, I placed my new 
The second tub is filled with Halloween erasers that I purchased from the Dollar Spot at Target two years ago. These seasonal erasers are always a great find and can be used for so many things. For the morning tub, I didn’t give the students a particular task for these. I just like to let their creativity take over. They have had so much fun making shapes, patterns, and pictures with these.
The third tub contains letter tiles. These tiles have all of the individual letters as well as common vowel pairs and word families. The letter tiles came with small magnetic boards, but cookie sheets would also work really well with these. I truly have no clue what brand these tiles are, but you could always just put regular 
My fourth tub contains 
I was so excited when I ordered this 
The sixth tub contains coloring pages. I included some primary type coloring pages that I downloaded for free from 
You can read about my first two rounds of Morning Tubs by clicking on the links below.
I truly like to put the focus on learning new vocabulary during this voyage instead of focusing completely on Columbus. I absolutely understand that Columbus Day is controversial in many ways, so for my first graders, I put the main focus on the idea of being an explorer. We discuss the meaning of the words voyage, explore, discover, explorer, trade, etc.
We start off by passing out our 
Then, we start our voyage. We read about our first trade item, and the students choose a trinket to trade. Then, we travel to the first location on our map. The students trade their trinket for the item from the Natives.
We trade for all types of items that the explorers traded for with the Native Americans (popcorn, spices, feathers, shells, etc.).
After we make each trade, we learn about the item in our booklets, and then write about our learning.
It’s a fun day, and the students love it.
At some point during the day, we also complete these 
I am a little bit obsessed with cute monsters…not scary ones. I even had a “monster themed” 1st 
These are great for students to fill out prior to conferences. It really gives you an insight into how they see their school year.
