Stellaluna and Bat Unit Study

This was actually a unscheduled study on bats since one of our local parks was having a presentation on bats this past week. I thought it might be fun to squeeze it in!

We read the book Stellaluna which was already in our book collection, and hit the library for some supplemental reading. One book I think is worth mentioning is The Little Lost Bat. It follows the life of a baby Mexican free-tailed bat as it is born in a cave. The book itself was quite sad as the baby loses its mother to an owl and eventually is adopted by another bat mother that has lost its own baby. It does quite a good job of showing the hardships that baby bats face.

Here are some pictures of our lapbook. We got most of the graphics for our lapbook from our favorite site Homeschool Share. The cover has some cutouts that we found at  First-school.ws . I reduced the size by 50% to fit two on the cover. Hailey and Charlie loved playing with the full size versions that they put together.

The inside front cover shows a booklet with different species of bats (bumblebee bat, fox bat, vampire bat, etc). On the first side of the folder we have a book of different diurnal (daytime) and nocturnal animals, a vocabulary pocket of words from Stellaluna, a book with a map of the places that we can find fruit bats (mega bats). The left side shows a three pocket strip that we got from Hands of a Child where we sorted different characteristics of Mega bats and Micro bats. On the right flap is a flap book of Omnivores, Herbivores, and Carnivores. Under each flap Hailey glued pictures of the animals that belong in each category.

The second side of the folder shows the Anatomy of the Bat, the different mammals that use echolocation, and a booklet that uses some word problems pulled from the book for math. The left flap shows a sample of handwriting. Since I am teaching Hailey cursive instead of print first I invested in software called Start Write. I can print out tracers in almost any learning font I wish, which for me is cursive. They also have manuscript, Handwriting without Tears cursive and print, Palmer and more! I love this software. The right flap has some really corny bat jokes on one side and some a poem and song about bats on the back.

The back cover shows Hailey’s art work. She started drawing the little lines for echolocation without any prompting. I asked where she got the idea to do that and she said she had seen it in a book we read. I love that she picks those things up. The insects all have frowny faces because they are about to be eaten!