Night Creatures

I absolutely love teaching in the month of October! The fall season & Halloween "symbols" really lend themselves to incorporating nonfiction into our curriculum....and I'm pretty sure everyone knows by now that I LOVE teaching with nonfiction. Just like every other kindergarten teacher, we did a unit on Nocturnal Animals (owls, bats, raccoons, fireflies, coyotes, etc).

This simple book was an awesome nonfiction book to introduce animals that are active at night.

 

As much as I would love to lead you to believe that I did the following bulletin board, I cannot take any credit for it. My amazing assistant, Mrs. Lively put the board together using the little ones' work and some of the questions we asked and answered during our nocturnal unit.

 

 

I am trying desperately to enlarge the pictures below so you can read the interesting facts to go with each critter but I'm not having much luck: (

 

The coyotes were die cuts put onto a background that was made using artist pastels (chalk) and then blended together using a tissue or their fingers. 

 

 

 

The owls were colored with regular crayons and then we painted over the top of it using a watered down blue paint to create a Crayon Resist effect.

 

 

 

I modified this raccoon pattern from a paper bag craft I found in a Mailbox magazine years ago.

 

 

I left the bat out of this picture but we found it very interesting to find out why bats hang upside down. Did you know that their feet aren't made for standing? That was an interesting fact we discovered after reading Stellaluna and comparing & contrasting bats & birds.

 

 

After reading The Very Lonely Firefly by Eric Carle, the kids made fingerprint fireflies in a jar using 3D yellow, iridescent puffy paint. Mrs. Lively took a piece of scrap laminating film to cover the "jar" to give it shiney "jar like" appearance but you can't really tell in the picture

 

 

 

This has by far been my favorite unit yet!  This week we will be learning about Scarecrows, Skeletons, and Spiders. I've got a feeling that it will be another fun week of learning!