This week second graders are reading Stellaluna and learning about bats. Today, we focused on nonfiction books and learning information about bats. We started off with a little bat chart and read-aloud. We definitely found out some new information!
After our read aloud we discussed the difference between facts and opinions. I gave sentences about bats to each student. They came up, read the sentence to the class, and we decided if it was a fact or opinion!
After our mini-lesson, I gave each student a paragraph about bats, blue highlighter, yellow highlighter, and eyeball rings (found at Kroger). I told the students that the rings were our Fact Finding Friends and they were going to help us distinguish between facts and opinions in the paragraph. We went through the sentences together, highlighting the facts yellow and the opinions blue. You can find these fact and opinion freebies HERE!
Afterwards, we made a simple little bat and used sticky notes to represent our learning. The students wrote an opinion about bats on the blue star sticky note, and a fact on the yellow! Keeping these the same color as their highlighters really helped them distinguish between the two! This bat craft is in October's Rooted in Reading :)
We didn't get to this yet, but it's all ready for later in the week. This little experiment comes from Holly Ehle. Here's how it works...
Bats use their sense of smell to locate their young. You get different flavors/scents and put them on cotton balls. Pass them out randomly to students (not telling them which is which). They walk around smelling the cotton balls of their classmates. If they find their bat family, they stick together until all of their members have been found. Then you can try and guess who has which scent! I bought the bats to wear around their wrists so they can really act like bats :)))
It was a really fun day jam-packed with lots of fact finding! This is one of my favorite times of the year in the classroom!!
