Nocturnal Animals Research Project

Nocturnal animals are seriously fascinating for kindergarteners.   What kindergartener wouldn't want to stay up all night? Plus, we get to learn cool words like mammal and echolocation. We started our research project by sorting between pictures of nocturnal and diurnal animals (not pictured) and watching a video from the Let's Find Out magazine website from Scholastic.  I use those videos for EVERYTHING. They are just long enough to peak the kids interest and stir up a lot of questions.  With our interest peaked, we decided to focus in on bats and owls. Then, we labeled a bat as a group and then on our own.

After labeling a bat, we read through some non-fiction bat books that I have from Scholastic and National Geographic Kids. We used these to help us complete our can, have, are chart.

This chart was not completed in one session.  We started it and then added to it as we did more research. I love how kindergarteners can do research by looking at photographs in non-fiction books. My students were fascinated that bats eat so many types of food, even watermelon! 

Next step: learning about echolocation. This is always a fan favorite. We watch the episode from "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That" with bats that shows how echolocation works and then make our own bat ears. 

The kids wanted to be sure that they were using colors that made sense so they looked through the books to check. Then we simulated echolocation by rolling a ball to the wall and watching it come back to us while squeaking like a bat.

It wouldn't be a fun unit without a snack! We made bats with double stuffed Oreos, frosting, and decorative candy eyes. They turned out super cute! (full disclosure: this is not my hand... it is the hand of one of the speech pathologists at my school who is much taller than me and has longer arms to better take a picture...lol)

The kids were so excited about all of the things they learned that we made two posters to teach others what we learned about bats. We painted the background with tempra paint and then used our favorite non-messy Kwik Stix paint to make the bats, trees, and bat food. If you haven't tried Kwik Stix, I promise they will change your life! They are solid tempra paint sticks that dry in 60 seconds. Can we say game changer?

Bats during the day:

 Bats at night:

We compared and contrasted bats and owls and made another can, have, are chart to help us organize our thinking.

We labeled and owl and then we made an owl snack. To make this snack you will need graham crackers, marshmallows, m&ms, and candy corn.

What activities do you do during your nocturnal animals unit?

Happy Teaching!