Stellaluna Fun!

We had SO much fun learning about bats last week!  My kids are really into non-fiction this year and LOVE “fact gathering”.  Kinda precious if you ask me ;)  At the beginning of the week, we read Stellaluna & followed up the story with a Bats vs. Birds Venn Diagram and a story map. 

My kids are really into story maps this year, too!  And I love having a visual to organize our thoughts. 

Since there were a lot of little problems and characters in Stellaluna, this was the perfect time to talk about main character & main problem.  We starred those on the story map to remember the difference!

I also had the kids make their own beginning/middle/end story map.  After they organized their thoughts onto their trifolds, one of my sweet moms came in to help guide the kids as they “published” their work on these bats…

We hung them {upside down} from the ceiling!

 

We red several non-fiction books about bats and used the info to help us fill out our Venn Diagram.

I LOVED this bat craft idea I saw on Chalk Talk.  I sat out the materials to create the bats, along with these pink strips of paper, at the writing center.  The kids used the Venn diagram as a reference to write two bat facts on their bats.  Some of my sweet little overachievers asked if they could write facts they remembered that weren’t listed on the diagram.  Well pin a rose on your nose little love…of course you can!

We learned about the differences between megabats & microbats and the kids were fascinated to learn that you can tell the difference between the two by the size of their eyes.  SO…I had different sized googly eyes that the kids could choose from to either make megabats or microbats.  Most of them made megabats!  No surprise there!

I set out a few hands-on bat themed activities at our literacy stations, too.  Click on the link below to download a word family word-to-picture match.  I cut the bats out & then cut their wings off.  The kids had to put the bat back together by matching the words to the pics that were on the wings.  {Once you see the download, you’ll understand…and if you don’t, just let me know!!}

I also created these word family bats {-ug, –un, –ut} programmed with various short u words.  I set out a clothesline and had the kids hang the bats {upside down} in ABC order.  My struggling kiddos were alphabetizing by first letter only.  My love-to-be-challenged kiddos had to look at the WHOLE word to alphabetize it correctly.  They LOVED this activity!  I just can’t believe I didn’t get any pictures!  CRAZY week!!!