Batty for Bats

 Prior to reading our first book for the week, Bats by Gail Gibbons,  we made a chart that showed what we already knew about Bats, this is called our schema.

 

 After reading Bats, we wrote down our new learning.  WOW, was there a lot that we learned. 

Later in the week we read the story Stellaluna by Janell Cannon.  

We used our schema to make book to world connections.  

Stellaluna was a fruit bat, we know that fruit bats are Megabats and live in South America and Asia.  This was a book to world connection. 

Stelluna could see at night, we know that bats can see at night and some bats use echolocation to help navigate through the night sky.  This was another book to work connection that we made. 

Through our bat investigations we learned that Bats have senses like us humans, but they use them in very different ways.  One things specifically, is that bats have a very strong sense of smell.  Mother bats will use their sense of smell to locate and identify their baby.  Just like Stellaluna's mother did!

So we decided to test this out!  Mrs. Wanke gave each of us a cotton ball with different scents.  We had to use ONLY our sense of smell to find other classmates that had the same scent as us.  This was harder than expected and gave us an appreciation for how strong their sense of smell really is!

 

Bat Day

 The kids were surprised with the entrance to our classroom being turned into a bat cave for bat day!  

For the past 2 weeks we have been reading books about bats.  We read a non-fiction book about Bats!

(click on the book to listen to the story)

We also read the story Stellaluna. It was fun to hear a fun story about a baby bat who lost her mother and had to live with birds.  Since we had learned about bats prior to reading the story, we could pick out the factual information that was infused into the story.  

(click the book to listen to the story)

So we started our bat day by watching the movie Stellaluna! 

After the movie we focused on the 3 types of bats.

   

To put our knowledge to the test Mrs. Wanke said we were going to dissect bat guano.  Little did we know she was playing a trick on us!  She gave us cups of chocolate pudding and told us it was bat guano.  We had to dig through the pudding to determine if the "guano" was from a micro bat, mega bat, or vampire bat by what was left over in the droppings.  If we found bones, we knew it was from a micro bat since micro bats eat insects and small animals.  If we found seeds we knew it was from a mega bat since mega bats eat fruit.  If we found red globs, we knew it was a vampire bat since vampire bats drink blood.    (bones=candy bones, seeds=sunflower seeds, and red blobs= red gummy bears)

bones = micro bat

seeds = mega bat

red blob= vampire bat

After we figured out what bat made our droppings, Mrs. Wanke told us to eat it as she let us in on her little joke!  

We learned that bats have a very strong sense of smell.  Mother bats can identify their baby by smell alone.  So, we put our sense of smell to the test.  Mrs. Wanke gave each of us a cotton ball with a scent on it.  We had to smell our cotton ball, then smell others' cotton balls to find our "baby bat" with the same scent.  This was a lot of fun.  Some of us did not like the scent of our cotton ball though.  

We had so much fun for our bat day!