bats

A Bat Cave Classroom Transformation

September 29, 2019 by Jodi Leave a Comment

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.

Nonfiction in October

October 3, 2014 by Jodi 4 Comments

I LOVE all of the fun topics to teach about in October! It’s a time of year when I can’t wait to pull out all of my nonfiction books and do tons of read alouds. One of my students this week said, “Wow! You always have a book about everything we are learning about.” Ha! Well, yes I do 🙂

I created this Nonfiction in October unit and have been working away at it for the last couple of weeks.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Nonfiction-in-October-1478159

This past week, we have been learning all about bats using this packet.

We read our information page and worked on text evidence by highlighting our answers in the text.

We created anchor charts.

We also worked a lot with vocabulary.

The other topics included in this packet are:

This 100 page unit will easily carry you through October.

This packet is on sale in my TpT store through the weekend.

We Are Going Batty!

October 1, 2014 by Jodi 3 Comments

Things have been batty in 1st grade. We have been busy, busy, busy reading tons of fiction and nonfiction books about bats. It’s always fun learning more about bats and sorting through the myths and facts. We created this anchor chart on Monday.

We thought of things that we knew about bats first. Then after reading a nonfiction book, we added our new learning.

The students also filled out their own charts for things that they “wondered” about bats.

The sheet above will be included in my upcoming packet “Nonfiction in October.”

Yesterday and today we worked on writing about bats and creating our own bats.

We’ve also been reading a lot of fiction bat books and using my new Fun with Fiction {Bats} packet.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fun-with-Fiction-Bats-1465998

Reading fiction and nonfiction books about bats has really allowed my students to distinguish between the two.

We will continue learning about bats all week. I’m hoping to have my latest packet finished soon, which includes tons of resources for teaching about bats, spiders, fire safety, owls, and pumpkins.

How can you not just LOVE October?

It’s October!

October 1, 2013 by Jodi 4 Comments

It’s officially my favorite month! I love October…the weather, pumpkins, the changing leaves, Halloween decorations, and the fact that my first graders always seem to get into the groove of things by October. I always tell myself that they will be first graders in October. Until then, they are still Kindergarteners.

Today we started learning about bats. We created this chart to discuss our schema.

After reading a nonfiction book about bats, we added misconceptions and new learning to our chart.

We discussed that some types of bats eat mosquitoes and that they can eat up to 600 in one hour. I put my students into 6 groups. They cut out mosquitoes and glued them onto paper plates. This is one of my favorite activities. It is such a great {and disgusting} visual.

You can find some freebies from my post last year by clicking here.

We also started our October Fluency passages today.

These are the same ones I have had available, I just updated the cover. Here are some samples of my fluency passages.

I hope you’re as excited about October as I am.

More Bat Activities

October 5, 2011 by Jodi 17 Comments

One of my favorite bat activities to do every year is to tell students the number of mosquitoes that one bat can eat in an hour… 600! If that doesn’t make you love bats, I don’t know what will!! Then I put students into 6 groups, give each group 100 mosquitoes to cut out, and a paper plate. Each group cuts out 100 mosquitoes and glues them to the plate.

This is such a great {and disgusting} visual. You can download 100 mosquitoes by clicking here.

We also talked about the size of bats. The smallest bat is the Bumblebee Bat with a 5 inch wingspan and the largest is the Flying Fox with a 6 foot wingspan. We measured these two lengths and cut yarn to show them.

If you want the signs for these lengths and for the mosquitoes, click here.

Next,we wrote about the things we have learned about bats. We filled out a graphic organizer first, then transfered it to our final draft. Click here for these pages.

I love this one, “Bats are the best thing that ever happened to me.” Too cute!

Tomorrow we will be playing a fun game outside that is very similar to Marco Polo. One or two students will be blindfolded {bats} and the other students will be walking around them {mosquitoes.} The bats will call out “Echo” and the mosquitoes will call out “Location.” The bats will have to tag the mosquitoes. The kids love this and it really makes that great vocabulary word, echolocation, stick in their little brains.

Bats

October 3, 2011 by Jodi 4 Comments

I love teaching my students about bats. I think they are such interesting animals. It’s so much fun to discuss the truths and myths about bats. Many of my students start off the week being scared of bats and by the end, they love them and know how important bats are to our ecosystem. Even my 4 year old always says that bats are her friends because they eat bugs 😉

Today, we started off by making a list of things that we wonder about bats.

Then I drew a quick chart on the board saying “Is a bat a bird?” I passed out a small Post-It to each student and had them write either “yes” or “no.” Then they went up and placed their answer on the board.

{I thought I took a picture of this chart, but I guess not.} More of my students thought that “Yes” bats were birds. I think it was 13 – 7, so they were very surprised to find out the real answer. We discussed the reasons why bats are not birds.

Next, we read this book.