Bats and Spiders

In the weeks prior to Halloween, our class did units on Bats and Spiders. The kids loved learning about these creepy crawlies! And that was the theme of our class bulletin board. The kids got to pick if they wanted to make a bat or a spider and we called our board Cavett's Creepy Crawlies! They decorated the bats with glitter and the kids made the spiders with black paint handprints. They finished them off with googily eyes!

Here is our finished product! It is by FAR my favorite bulletin board :)

We started our two week unit with bats. We started by learning a fun bat song sung to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it."

We did our customary KWL chart about bats and we read the book Stellaluna. I love seeing what my kids already know about units, but my favorite part is hearing their questions. They had some great questions including How do bats have babies? Where do they sleep? What do they eat? But my favorite was How do bats make friends?

We learned more about bats by watching Magic School Bus video on Bats and reading our Time for Kids magazine on bats.

I also used an activity from Made for First Grade's Nocturnal Animals unit. The kids unscrambled bat fact sentences and copied them in their own bat book. They then illustrated the facts.

At the end of the week, the kids wrote a short paragraph on what they learned about bats this week. Here are a few examples:

We started off the week on spiders by starting to read Charlotte's Web . We are still reading it now and the kids love to listen. I love how engaged they are even though there are very few pictures. They also like to ask questions about the new vocabulary they don't know.

A fun experiment from Deanna Jump we did taught us how spiders kill and eat their prey. The kids got a sugar cube and and a straw. The dripped some water on the cube and then sucked the cube up the straw once it was melted. We talked about how spiders use venom (water) to paralyze their prey (sugar cube). They then "drink" their prey.

We also did some spider problems during math time:

Instead of a KWL chart, we did a fact web! Get it? Yeah, the kids didn't laugh either. :) I got this spider activity from Rachelle's Halloween unit. After reading about spiders (and once again, watching Magic School Bus on spiders) we wrote down the different facts we learned about spiders. On the back the kids wrote a short paragraph on what they know about spiders.

Coming Soon: Pumpkins and Halloween!