Nocturnal Night

One of my closest friends Cheryl over at Primary Graffiti and I have been doing a thematic unit she developed 6 or 7 years ago called Nocturnal Night.  We combined our classes a few times in the beginning but we've been teaching on different grade levels for 4 years now so our versions of Nocturnal Night have morphed to meet the needs of the students we teach.  

Basically we black out our windows and learn out nocturnal creatures on Halloween (since the school we teach at won't let us celebrate Halloween any other way).  Neither of us have bothered making a unit to sell on TpT because there really is so much out there especially this year.  Check out the activities my students got into this year!

We kicked it off by casting a vote about whether or not we were afraid of bats.  Then we filled out the Know and Wonder portion of our KWL chart.  My favorite KNOW fact is the last one...."bats turn into human vampires."  We later corrected that misconception but it's always a fun one to list :).  We read a Nat Geo Bats book and labeled the parts of a bat.

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Next we read another Bat reader that I found in our reading series and completed the Learned portion of our KWL.  Before we went to lunch students separated into 6 groups and glued 100 mosquitos to a paper plate.  We hung them on the wall and discussed one of the bat facts we learned which was that bats can eat between 600-1000 mosquito's in 1 hour.  The visual of 6 plates full of mosquito's always leaves them amazed!  

After lunch we read Black Out and listed other animals that are active at night but sleep during the day.

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Then students rotated through a round of literacy and math centers.  For math we did some tally mark number matching and recording and the skip counting number puzzles from my Room on the Broom Book Companion.

For literacy centers students read bat books and did word building using the word "nocturnal."  They listed words on the recording sheet according to the number of letters in the word they built.

Finally, I snuck in another craft....ahem, what?  I mean they refined their fine motor skills making bats!

Nocturnal Night might be my favorite thematic day all year!  I love the rich vocabulary they get particularly from focusing on bats.  Echolocation comes up during report writing when we write about dolphins and nocturnal becomes a word they never forget!

Noah made this sign to hang on our door on Nocturnal Night....

The day ended with a vocabulary parade where students chose a word from our book of the month, Max's Words and illustrated or recreated it in some form (my students chose a word and created a sentence strip hat).  Each class got to parade through the halls.  It was loud but they had a great time!

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Last but not least, I just wanted to share our jack-o-lanterns this year!  I hope you all had a Happy Halloween and for everyone on the upper east coast, I hope you're drying out and life is returning to normal.