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By the time October rolls around, your students will be seeing bat-themed decorations in the store, at home, and in classrooms. This means that it’s a perfect time to learn more about bats! In this post, I’m going to share some kindergarten bat activities that are perfect for young learners. These hands-on activities will help your students practice a variety of literacy and math skills as they learn more about bats.
There are many fun bat-themed literacy activities that will help your students practice phonics, reading comprehension, and writing skills.
Get your students excited for a week of bat activities by reading a non-fiction book about bats. You can add new learning to a class anchor chart as you read together. After you have had a chance to read and discuss what you’ve learned about bats, students can fill out their own graphic organizer!
After filling out their graphic organizer with different facts about bats, students can choose their favorite facts for a cute bat craft! Students will create their own bats from black construction paper, then add a fact book about bats to the center. These look great on a fall bulletin board!
Students can practice beginning sounds with this fun picture sort! After coloring and sorting pictures based on beginning sounds, they can turn it into a fun lift-the-flap activity!
Help your students practice CVC word building with the Batty Words activity! Each child will have a bat-themed word-building mat and letter cards. As you say the words out loud, students will use their letter cards to build each word.
We can’t talk about kindergarten bat activities without Stellaluna! As you read the book with your class, you can discuss the various story elements together while creating an anchor chart.
Each section of the anchor chart corresponds to a page in a story elements book that your students can create!
After reading (or rereading) Stellaluna with your class, you can focus on one part of the anchor chart and story elements book. Then repeat this each day until your students have a completed book that discusses characters, setting, sequence of events, as well as the problem and solution.
By this point, your students have learned a lot about bats from reading Stellaluna as well as nonfiction books about bats. They will have also learned about birds from the story Stellaluna. Now you can use this knowledge for a fun comparison activity!
First, you can explain and demonstrate a Venn diagram while you fill it out together as a class. You can work together to identify facts that apply to bats only, facts that apply to birds, and things they have in common. After completing the anchor chart as a class, students can fill out their own Venn diagrams. They can do this independently, using the anchor chart as a guide, or you can fill it out as a class.
After students have been able to see the differences and similarities between birds and bats, they can create a fun flip book! They can write something that is unique to bats under one flap, something unique to birds under another flap, and then something they have in common under the center flap. This is a fun way to review everything you’ve discussed and learned about birds and bats!
This fun activity helps your students practice their fine motor skills with a directed drawing activity. Students love learning how to draw a bat! After finishing the drawing, students can unscramble and write a sentence about bats.
Having fun with bats isn’t just for your literacy block! There are many ways that you can incorporate some batty fun into math practice.
First, students can practice matching two different representations of a number with a bat wings number matching game! Students will find the matching number of dots for each numbered bat.
You can combine writing and math practice with this counting activity! After placing a combination of bats and birds on their mats, students can write a sentence to describe how many of each can fly.
Students can also practice counting the number of bats and birds on each page of this mini-reader. Students will count and write the number of bats and birds to complete each sentence. The total number of bats and birds on each page is ten, so this is a great activity to show different number combinations of ten! The predictable text also makes it perfect for some extra reading practice!
Another opportunity for counting practice is a printable mini reader with three options. You can select the option that best fits the needs of your students. The first option already has the number written in the sentence and the students just need to trace the number. The second option does not have a traceable number, so students will need to write the correct number of bats on the line. The third option does not have a sentence frame, so students can practice writing the full sentence themselves.
No matter which option you choose, your students will enjoy counting the bats on each page. They always love to take these books home to share with their families!
All of the bat activities shown above (and more!) can be found in my printable Bats Unit for Kindergarten. It includes a variety of math and literacy activities that you can use in your kindergarten classroom. I have also included a sample bat unit lesson plan to give you an idea of how you can space out the activities throughout the unit study.
Would you like to take a closer look at everything included in this bats unit? You can find this resource in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers.
I hope these fun bat activities have given you some ideas for your next kindergarten unit study! You might also like to take a look at some spider activities and scarecrow activities, which are also perfect for October thematic units.
If you want to find these bat activity ideas later, be sure to add this pin to your favorite board on Pinterest. This will make it easier for you to quickly find these ideas later. Plus, it will help other teachers who are looking for fun seasonal learning activities for October!
These alphabet books will have students dive deep into learning about each letter of the alphabet while eager to see what activity they get to complete next!
