Spooky Bats!

This lesson was passed to me from our 'traveling' art teacher, Ms. Anderson.  She always comes up with creative and fun seasonal projects that our students get excited about.  For starters, we read the book Stellaluna by Janell Cannon.  This gave the students background information about bats, what they eat, where they live, how they sleep, etc.

The main idea of this project is getting the kids thinking about how to cut-out specific shapes, and put them together to create something recognizable, in this case, a bat.  I handed out 6"x9" purple rectangles and had the students cut an oval from top to left, to bottom, to right, and back up to the top (basically, cutting the corners off).  Next, I gave them a 9"x12" purple paper and had them fold it in half and draw the wing shapes (one large 'rainbow' for the top of the wing and three small 'rainbows' for the scalloped edges at the bottom of the wing).  Of course, they kept the paper folded while they cut so they would have two identical wings - and they think that is just magic :)  We also folded the wings accordion-style to give the wings movement.  After we cut out all of the features, they added color, detail, and pattern to their bats using crayons.