Have a Bat Day with First Grade

Have a Bat Day with First Grade!

I am a mammal who can fly up to 60 miles per hour.  I can eat 600 mosquitoes in one hour!  I am nocturnal and use echolocation to find my food.  I have four fingers and a thumb, just like you!  What creature am I?  First grade students at SES know the answer; a bat!

After spending the week learning about bats, first grade students arrived to school on the morning of Friday, October 21st to find that their classrooms had been transformed into bat caves!  They could not wait to get inside!  Students were asked to dress in black and bring their flashlights because the “caves” were dark all day long!  Students spent the day researching about bats, writing about bats, playing interactive bat games, and reading with their flashlights and headlamps. They even completed a few science activities that really made these bat facts come to life!

Did you know a mother bat can locate her pup by using her sense of smell?  Using cotton balls infused with strong scents of vanilla and orange, one student (acting as “mother bat”) had to smell his/her cotton ball and then find the student (pup) who had the matching scent.  Students got to take turns being the mother bat and the pup.

To illustrate the process of echolocation, students used two tubes and a pie plate.  The two tubes were slightly angled toward each other and taped to a desk.  They were pointed toward a pie plate.  When one student whispered into one tube, the sound bounced off the pie plate, and another student could hear it through the second tube.  Students were able to understand and explain how the sound waves emitted from a bat bounce off of an object and back to the bat’s ears.  Students learned that bats are really using their ears to help them “see” in the dark!

The first grade students went absolutely “batty” over Bat Cave Day!  

Whitney Johnson is a 1st grade teacher at Sheridan Elementary!

You can follow her and her students at @mrswhitneyj on Twitter!