Preschool Science: Studying Bats with Hide and Sonar-Seek
Bats are creepy…and really cool. Studying bats with the preschool set can help demystify this often misunderstood mammal. And it’s such a neat topic that big brothers and sisters will want to jump in and work alongside of their little siblings.
Let’s face it, bats are strange. They’re mammals. With wings. And they have these clickety-clackety little claws that cling to branches and out-croppings where they hang upside down to sleep. In caves.
Just bizarre.
Which is why they’re the perfect animal to study with kids. Bats are helpers. They’re a beneficial animal because a single one can eat more than 1000 mosquitoes in an hour. An hour. I don’t know about you, but I’d love a bat to take up residence in my backyard with that kind of statistic. I’d rather have a bat swooping around than get eaten alive.
My kids agreed after we learned more about these amazing creatures.
Did you know:
- that bats are found all over the world except where it is extremely hot or cold?
- that they are the only mammals capable of flight?
- there are more than 1000 species of bats in the world?
- that bats use echolocation to find their ways around and to locate prey? They send a series of sounds out, and listen for the patterns in which they bounce back.
- that the flying fox, a bat found in Indonesia, has a wingspan of nearly 6 feet?
- that many species of bats are now endangered?
Great Resources
We started by reading as many books as we could get our hands on. My kids like to draw or build with LEGO while I read to them. While I read bat books to them, they built multicolored bats out of LEGO.
We enjoyed:
- Bats by Gail Gibbons
- National Geographic Readers: Bats by Elizabeth Carney
- Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies
- Bats! {Time for Kids Science} by Nicole Iorio
- Bats: Strange and Wonderful by Laurence Pringle
- There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat by Lucille Colandro
- Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats by Anne Earle
- Stellaluna by Janell Cannon
- The Truth About Bats {Magic School Bus Chapter Books} by Eva Moore
- Bats of the World by Gary L. Graham
The Game
The kids all think that the best part of our little mini unit on bats was the game we played. We dubbed it Hide and Sonar-Seek.
The rules are simple:
- One person is the bat and the rest are mosquitoes.
- The bat wears a blindfold {in a safe room or the backyard}.
- The mosquitoes scatter, but make little squeaking noises to simulate the bat’s echoes bouncing off their bodies.
- The bats flaps around trying to catch a mosquito by following the sound of the squeaking.
- When the bat catches a mosquito the round ends, and the mosquito becomes the next bat.
We had a lot of fun learning about bats, their characteristics, and playing the game to go along with this week’s #PlayfulPreschool theme, nighttime. Make sure you check out some of the other posts to help you plan your own nocturnal theme for your little ones: