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?

Five for Friday{ish}

September 27, 2014 by Jodi 3 Comments

I know, I know…it’s Saturday, but I’m just now getting around to linking up for Five for Friday.

http://doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/2014/09/five-for-friday-linky-party-september_26.html

It’s been awhile since I’ve linked up with this Linky Party, but I felt like I had a bunch of randomness to share and this was perfect.

Now that it’s officially fall, we started writing about it. I shared this writing freebie on my blog this week.

We have been waiting ~~not so~~ patiently for our butterflies and on Friday, we finally had one emerge from it’s chrysalis. The students were SO excited. “This is the best day of my life,” was said more than once. Yes, they were hyper and yes, I felt sorry for our PE teacher because she had to have my class right after the butterfly came out, but I was so happy that they were able to see it and they didn’t miss it over the weekend.

This next week, we will be learning all about bats. We will be reading tons of nonfiction books, but I also have a lot of fiction books about bats as well that I wanted to throw in and have some fun with. I created this little unit that we will be using next week with our fiction books.

I’m so thankful for the amazing weather we’ve been having in Indiana lately because both of my girls are playing fall soccer and we are at the soccer fields three days a week.

I have had a lot of requests to bundle my Games Galore packets and I FINALLY did. I am not finished with November, December, and January yet, but they will be added as I finish them.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Games-Galore-The-Bundle-1458011

These NO PREP games are perfect for centers, as a time filler when you just have a couple of minutes, or when you know your students need to move and do something different.

If you just need the October edition, you can find it by clicking below.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Games-Galore-No-Prep-Math-Literacy-Games-for-October-1453267

Happy weekend everyone!

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.

Informative Writing and Bat Freebies

October 7, 2012 by Jodi 23 Comments

We began learning about bats this week. I love teaching about bats. Even though I think they are kind of gross, they truly are useful animals and I like to clear up the common myths about bats.

You can see my posts from last year about bats by clicking HERE and HERE.

I have placed all of my bat freebies into one packet. Click on the picture below to head on over to Teachers Pay Teachers to download for FREE.