Bats

Read Stellaluna by Janelle Cannon. Write who the story is about on one side of a cube, where the story happens on another side, when the story happens on another, and so on. Here is a cube pattern.

Read about bats. As a class, discuss the good things bats do for the environment. Invite a bat specialist to participate in the discussion.

As a group, discuss the meanings and the reasons that certain phrases containing the word "bat" and why they might have been included in our language. Example: a person who is "batty," they have "bats in their belfry", "blind as a bat." Find others.

Create bat cutouts for students to measure the wingspan.

Here is a bat activity based on the patterns of Pascal's Triangle. Students will identify the patterns.

Study several books and websites on bats. Science Trek and National Geographic Kids could be great resources. Find numerical values related to the lives of bats. Round these numbers to any place value as determined by the teacher.

Examples of patterns could include that all animals need food in order to live and grow, and the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals. Animals obtain their food from plants or from other animals.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

Animals have body parts that capture and convey different kinds of information needed for growth and survival. Animals respond to these inputs with behaviors that help them survive. Different animals use their body parts in different ways to see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, move from place to place, and seek and take in food.

Plants depend on animals for pollination or to move their seeds around. Designs can be conveyed through sketches, drawings, or physical models. These representations are useful in communicating ideas for a problem's solutions to other people.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land. The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes. Groups may serve different functions and vary dramatically in size.

Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc.

Different sense receptors are specialized for particular kinds of information, which may be then processed by the animal's brain. Animals are able to use their perceptions and memories to guide their actions.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. An example of cause and effect relationships could be animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. Matter cycles between the air and soil and among plants, animals, and microbes as these organisms live and die. Organisms obtain gases and water from the environment, and release waste matter (gas, liquid, or solid) back into the environment Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life.

In multicellular animals, the body is a system of multiple interacting subsystems. These subsystems are groups of cells that work together to form tissues. Tissues form organs that are specialized for particular body functions.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.

Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared. Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.

Natural selection leads to the predominance of certain traits in a population, and the suppression of others. Emphasis is on using concepts of natural selection in animals, such as overproduction of offspring, passage of time, variation in a population, selection of favorable traits, and heritability of traits.

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health. Changes in biodiversity can influence ecosystem services that humans rely on.