Tag: bats

Bat Puppets

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Bat Puppets (4)

This craft, care of Veronika’s latest High Five magazine, hits just the note between cute and spooky for preschoolers celebrating Halloween.

To start, paint empty toilet paper tubes (or paper towel tubes cut in half) any color your child desires. You can stick with a classic Halloween orange-and-black theme, but Veronika chose a sparkly mix of purple and yellow glitter paint!

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High Five recommended using black craft foam for the wings, but colored construction paper was a fine substitute. Cut a semi-circle for each wing, then make three tiny semi-circle snips along the bottom to make a ragged bat wing edge.

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Finally, cut small triangles for fangs and glue on to the tubes, along with the wings and wiggle eyes.

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I loved that our resulting bats had quirky preschooler style, whether eyes that were slightly askew or an extra eye on a bat wing. This meant Veronika truly had ownership of the craft… and made our bats a little extra spooky, too!

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Halloween Countdown Day 9: Go Batty

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Halloween 9 Get Batty (3)

Today we got silly with our Halloween countdown with an activity that was equal parts imagination and learning. Halloween decor features so many creatures that we think of as scary, but that have fascinating science behind them. Think spiders, black cats, and in this case… bats!

To set the scene, we first watched a Wild Kratt’s bat episode. The kids thought they were just watching a cartoon, but there was lots to learn about echolocation! We also checked out a quick nature clip about the sounds that bats make to echolocate (navigate by bouncing sounds off the walls).

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Now the question was, could the kids do it?

We dressed up in black gear (capes and hats!) and they closed their eyes in the middle of the living room.

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I encouraged lots of chirpy baby bat noises. For Veronika, this was just silly fun, but Travis was so proud that he really could make it through our first floor without bumping into any walls.

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For extra batty fun, I traced a bat template onto black construction paper, then cut these out and taped to craft sticks. Now each kid had a bat to fly around!

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Travis loved hanging the bats upside down on walls and windows, and it led to lots more play throughout their evening.

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Now Halloween bats won’t seem quite so spooky!

Dancing Bats and Ghosts

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Dancing Ghost (7)

What is it with playground slides and static electricity? Travis was fascinated the other day when he kept picking up a shock each time he went down the slide and then touched the railing on the stairs back up. So we turned it into a teachable moment – minus the shock! – with this little lesson on static electricity at home. You can cut any shape you want into tissue paper, but since it’s Halloween, we had to go with bats and ghosts of course.

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I didn’t trust myself to cut tissue paper free-hand, so downloaded templates of a bat and ghost, and traced onto the paper before cutting out.

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Tape the shapes to a tabletop or similar surface; set aside.

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To create the static, blow up a balloon (a spooky black was the perfect shade for today), and rub in your hair (or on a sweater). Hold the balloon over the tissue paper, and the static will make the ghosts and bats lift up and dance!

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Travis loved every element of this experiment, including making static from his own hair…

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…And seeing if he could make the tissue paper rise up.

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Of course you also could just create static and the tissue paper will stick directly to the balloon, but taping our tissue paper spookies to the table turned it into a hokey Halloween jig.

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