Teddy Bears, Bats, and Positional Words

It's been a while since I have posted. Boy have we been busy! We have studied teddy bears and positional words and learned about apples and bats. This is in addition to everything else we do on a daily basis. As usual, I will add a caption to the pics so you will know what's going on. 

Below are pics of the kiddos working on the Bears in the Night mural. Suzan Estes used to do this and I absolutely love it. We talk about the sequence of the story and work on positional words. The kids had a blast.

 These are pics of the kids completing their Teddy Bear Exploration Books that I created several years ago. They bring a teddy from home and weigh it against their name cubes, measure with unifix cubes, color to match, compare to a friend's bear, etc.

Ladybug Day at school...

After letting our Bears in the Night mural dry overnight, we came back and discussed positional words in more detail. Each child was given a word and had to "show" us what it meant. I will put the word above each pic.
                                         AT

                               DOWN

                      OVER

                            UNDER

                             AROUND

                        BETWEEN

                         THROUGH

                                 UP

                                            AT

                                   DOWN

                            OVER

                           UNDER

                                   AROUND

                                           THROUGH

                           UP-I love this pic!!! He is jumping up and laughing!!

 Our completed mural...

LOVE the owl!!

My little ladybugs

How do bat moms know their babies? One way is by smell. We did an experiment that let us locate our bat family by smell. Each child received a bat die-cut with a cotton ball on it. The cotton balls were dipped in different scents. We had lemon, cinnamon roll, Love Spell, and Hawaiian Breeze. There were four families.

Hunting for our bat families...

The first family to locate one another.

My student teacher also got involved.

Our second bat family.

The third bat family.

And, the last bat family.

We also learned about echolocation. This is how most bats know where food and other items are at night. They send out sound waves and when they hit something the vibration comes back to the bat. Here we are seeing what a vibration is. We are ONLY 5 and 6 years old and a lot of big words are being thrown around!!! Each child lightly hit the table with his or her pencil and felt the vibration through the pencil.

Did you know that the largest bat is the Flying Fox bat? Well, we learned all about it. It's wingspan is 6 feet long!!!!! My children thought that our tallest child was probably about that tall. They remembered measuring for T-Rex so they told him to lie down so they could count the squares on the floor. We learned that he is not 6 feet tall. I also had to be measured. Again, not even close!!!

They decided to just lay the paper down and count the squares.

Now it is 6 feet long.

I drew lines to make it look like wings.

This was our inspiration. We also discussed symmetry because he is symmetrical.

Ta-Da!!! Bat wings.

Bats have 5 fingers on each side of the wing. Pretty cool, huh? We used craft sticks for his fingers and tail.

Adding "fur" for the body.

Our completed Flying Fox bat.

We decided to write down everything we learned about bats. Wow, I really thought I might have to add some things myself but I finally had to tell them to stop because there was no more room!!!!! Believe it or not, I tried to write exactly what they said. In case you haven't noticed, I have a really smart class!!!!!