We’re going BATTY in kindergarten! This is one of my favorite nonfiction units for kindergarten and first grade because it’s full of fun bat week activities and crafts!
Doing a bat nonfiction unit is perfect for October because it gives you some creepy fun whether you can celebrate Halloween or not.
Plus, what kid wouldn’t love to learn all about bats? Having a bat week is an easy way to engage your students in October.
Bat Research for Kindergarten
We start by reading all about bats with this nonfiction bat book! It’s full of good information and bright photographs.
We read nonfiction books about bats every day. Then, students help fill out our bats can, have, are anchor chart by giving me information to put on sticky notes.
We only focus on one of the headings each day. As you can see, this day we were working on “Bats have.”
After students give me information for the bat anchor chart, we use the information to do some interactive writing together on the board.
All week, we are working on an All About Bats book and craft. You can have students choose their own sentence to write each day or have them copy one of the sentences you wrote together as a class.
This bat craft makes a super cute hallway display or bulletin board. If you put the head and wings the opposite way, you can make your bats hang upside down!
As we read about bats, students also get to color their own bat emergent reader. This stays in their book boxes and then goes home for them to read with their families.
Bat Life Cycle Activities
Life cycles are a big component of our kindergarten science curriculum, so I love that we can hit that by studying the bat life cycle!
We read all about the bat life cycle. Then, students get to practice sequencing the bat life cycle by making this adorable bat life cycle craft:
This is another craft that you can switch the position of the head and wings so that the bat is upside down.
Bat Directed Drawing
You know we love directed drawings in my classroom! This bat directed drawing is perfect to pair with our bat research in kindergarten.
I used watercolor paint for this directed drawing, but you can have your students use crayons if paint at the beginning of kindergarten scares you!
Grab the free bat directed drawing directions here!
Bat STEM Challenge
This bat STEM challenge is one of my favorite bat week activities! Students are tasked with building a bat cave for their bats to roost in. This fits the science standards of having students design a shelter for animals.
Julie from Big Ideas for Little Hands’ class completed this October STEM challenge with her class.
They made their bat caves using items found around the classroom:
Didn’t they do a great job?
Parts of a Bat Labeling
We also practice labeling the parts of the bat. I make a big bat out of butcher paper and we practice labeling together whole group. Then, students practice labeling on their own.
Bats vs Birds Fact Sorting
We also compare bats vs birds and how they are similar and different. We read about them, sort facts as a class, and then students fill out their own venn diagrams.
This bat week activity, along with all the bat crafts and bat nonfiction activities, is included in my All About Bats unit.
Bat Week Centers for Kindergarten
Themed centers are such an easy way to engage your students in practicing important math and literacy skills. I often find my students using the pieces to act out some of the information we learned about bats as they complete the center!
For this phonemic awareness center, students will match the rhyming pairs. Rhyme recognition is a tough skill, so I try to fit this into our literacy centers as much as possible!
These bat ten frame mats would be so much fun with playdough to form the numbers, but you can also add counters or mini erasers! They are great for building number sense.
Batty for sight words! For this October sight word center, students will choose a sight word card. Then, they will use the bat letters to build the word in the cave.
A color version and a black and white ink saver version of every center are included.
For this bat week center, students will match the pictures to the letter they begin with. You can give students only a few cards to match to make it less overwhelming, or let them work together to match them all.
Spin and cover is one of our all time favorite games to play during centers! Students can play this game independently, or they can play with a partner. Whoever has the most spots covered in the end wins.
This subitizing center is perfect for building number sense. Students will match the amounts on the bats to the numbers on the caves.
You can find all of the bat math and literacy centers for kindergarten here!
Centers for Social Distancing
Need a bat themed center for social distancing? This Feed the Bat center is perfect!
It includes a printable and digital version that is ready for Google Slides™. You students will love practicing the letters m, s, t, b, and f by feeding the bat pictures that begin with those letters!
Grab the Feed the Bat freebie at the bottom of this post!
Are you having a bat week this October? I would love to hear about what you’re doing down below!
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