You can warm up your audience (depending on their age!) with a few batty riddles:
What bat do you find at the circus?
An acro-bat!
Why did the little bat want to get a job?
He was tired of just hanging around.
Which bat knows it’s ABC’s?
The alpha-bat!
Little Bumblebee Bat is a just about perfect non-fiction book to introduce bats to a preschool audience. It is in question and answer format, the text is straightforward, short and informative, and appealing illustrations add to the interest.
Bats Are Sleeping
(tune: Frere Jacques)
Bats are sleeping
Bats are sleeping
Upside down.
Upside down.
Waiting for the night to come,
Waiting for the night to come,
Then they’ll fly around.
Then they’ll fly around.
I’ve sung this several times with kids, but this is the first time that I’ve had kids act it out to the point of lying down and putting their legs in the air to pretend to sleep upside down!
Song/Video: “Doing the Batty Bat” and counting bats with Count von Count from Sesame Street:
Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies is a wonderful non-fiction picture book.
Additional books you could use are Stellaluna by Janell Cannon, Bats in the Library by Brian Lies, and Bat Jamboree by Kathi Appelt.
Next we did a night/day game activity about bats. I held up one sign that said “night” with a picture of a moon and the children flew around like bats and when I showed the other sign that said “day” they curled up (as upside down as they could get!), wrapped their arms (wings) around themselves and pretended they were sleeping.
We also played a sonar game so they can understand what it is like to “see” with their ears. One child is the bat and wears a blindfold. All the other kids are the insects (bat food). The bat went “beep, beep” and the insects went “buzz, buzz” and if the bat caught the insects she sent them to the bat cave.
We finished with a black bat craft.
Cultivate Wonder 