Nature Study Lesson 59: The Bat and Mammals

For this week's Nature Study I read about mammals, introduced on page 214 in the Handbook of Nature Study and Bats on pages 241-245). Every summer in the evenings we can see bats flying around our backyard. It is so cool how they fly; darting about. 

We first discussed the characteristics of mammals and then we looked at bats in particular. Although lesson 59 suggests that the teacher temporarily keep a bat in the classroom in a cage, I didn't think that this was feasible for us, so we made as many observations as we could using photographs and observations of naturally flying bats outside. They made sketches and noted their observations in their notebooks.

They all know the Magic School Bus: Going Batty video and this has a lot of information about bats in it as well.

At bedtime we read about Flitter the bat in The Burgess Animal Book for Children (story 21) and looked at the illustration on page 128 of the Little Brown Bat. We reviewed again why the bat is considered a mammal and how he differs from birds.