Planning for Bat Week

Next week, Bat week is on the menu!! 

I have a lot of posts from the past on our Bat weeks - There was some tons of fun to be had! Click {HERE} to check out 1st Grade's bat activities. You can check out what I did when I taught 2nd grade {HERE} and {HERE}.

But I'll give you some of my must dos in this post...

But FIRST... here are some of my favorite books to read during the week. Click on the pictures to find them on Amazon. 

Click the image to check out more bat books on Amazon. 

After we read one of the NF books, we started in on the  Bats Tree Map. The numbers and checkmarks are from when we used this as our planning sheet for our Facts About Bats Writing. We glued it into our reader's notebook and kept adding to our tree map throughout the week.

We also learned how to draw a bat. I found this OH SO CUTE directed drawing from Bren in Room 10. When I made the print up for it, I made sure to put where I got it... because I knew I'd forget - ha!

One of the best things I like about directed drawings is that I get to learn how to draw too - haahaa!  I had my kids add a few more details so we could label the actual parts of the bat.

Then I had them draw the habitat that they would be living in....some got so creative!  Here's a cave.

And then the treebranch...I just love the artistic abilities that these kids have!

Our end of the week writing project was to use our tree map to write at least 3 things about facts. Some wrote even more!  We glued the writing on top of our bat labeling picture.

And sometimes our copier jams and we just write it on regular writing paper. No harm in that! 

These writing and crafts below might be some of my favorite to hang up! I love the dusk paintings!

The writing page comes from my Label It and Write About it pack. You can find all of my October writing packs HERE. 

We also love listening to Stellaluna being read on Storyline Online. 

After we read Stellaluna, we did our SWBSF (found in my Bat pack) that they wrote in their reader's notebook. 

Then they wrote it out in paragraph form. They had to highlight the "cue" words to make sure they were writing the events in order and to make sure they included all their details. I will say that ALREADY my kids are getting how to turn their notes into writing!  I have a few that are still struggling, but that's ok - they're getting better! The OH SO CUTE bat is a FREEBIE craft that comes from one of my favorite ladies, A Cupcake for the Teacher.

Then, we watched the YouTube video, Echolocation Song...maybe like a hundred times - they love it!  So I turned it into a song for their poetry journal and they illustrated what echolocation means. Click on the picture below to download the poem.

The funniest part?? I typed up the poem in a rush one morning and didn't even have time to proofread it... and we found a few mistakes - woops!! Oh well. A good editing lesson, right? haa!

We always put our poems in our poetry journals - You can find my FREE poetry journal covers HERE

We also compared bats and birds...

See some of the activities in this post in my Bats Unit!