Bats preschool science lesson

There are some homeschool science topics that are easily made seasonal, bats for instance work very well in October when everyone has bats hanging all over, so I made an executive decision to stop our insect studies and start a Bat science lesson, that’s the joy of being Mom, I can change the plans. Besides, this is still a Flying Creatures, so we’re still following along with our current lessons…

Bats science lesson supplies (for both craft and books)

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Bats craft supplies: toilet paper roll, Construction Paper, Pip-Squeaks Marker Tower,  Fiskars 5 Inch Kids Scissors,  poster paint 12 pack

Bats books and videos:

• Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats (Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science 2) (I have lost track of how many times we’ve checked this book out), 
• National Geographic Readers: Bats (Batman is nuts for this one), 
• Bats (I love Gail Gibbons books), 
• Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about that: Batty for Bats (this series in on Netflix and is the inspiration for our activity), 
• The Magic School Bus: The Complete Series (there’s a bat episode and this is just a good series to have, I believe it’s also on Netflix)

Future Ticia 2025 is going to add in a few videos from YouTube about bats.

 I like this Nat Geo kids bats video.

I found the Magic School Bus bat episode!

Score!

Bat craft

Ordinarily, I’d put this in a separate post, but since it was used for the Bat science lesson I figure I should keep them both together.

Future Ticia 2025, has discovered that I never actually wrote this, and there are no pictures to let you know what we did. So let me attempt to explain this.

1. Pinch the ends of the toilet paper roll down to create the body of the bat.
2. Paint the toilet paper roll black.
3. Cut out a bat shape from black construction paper.
4. When the paint is dry, glue the toilet paper roll onto the bat shape for the wings.
5. Now you have a fun bat that your child will happily play with, and I never got a picture of.

 

Bats science lesson activities

One of the big things we learned is that bats use echolocation to navigate around.  And when they “hear” something that sounds like food they start making even more clicking sounds to find it.

So, we, and by we I really mean the boys, primarily Batman; set up an obstacle course for our bats to navigate.  He took his “traps” (I think that’s what they were, maybe) and created an obstacle course of crumpled paper for the bat to navigate.

It was so cute watching them pretend to hear the clicks and say, “Oh no something is here, better go another way.”

Then we talked about how scientists studied bats for a very long time and figured out how to use their echolocation for our boats and submarines to use sonar.  Then they had to find a submarine toy and a boat toy and act out how they use sonar.

 They also learned most bats eat insects.  So they cut up a bunch of little pieces of paper and said that was the insects for the bats to eat, then they stuffed them inside their bats.

There are some days I just love to sit back and see how their minds work.

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Adapting this bat science lesson for older kids

So far this is a fairly obvious lesson for kindergarten or preschool, but there’s not much for elementary-aged kids.  Here are a few extension activities:

1. Compare how bats use sonar to other mammals that use sonar (whales and dolphins).
2. Compare bats and birds.  How are they different?
3. For middle school: where did the idea of bats drinking your blood come from?  Do any bats drink your blood?

A few more bat lesson ideas for you

• Bat and Ghost bunting
• bat silhouette
• paper plate bats
• hanging bat craft

• Photo by Riizz on Unsplash