Handwriting, Letter Formation

Stellaluna Activity

by Colleen Beck
September 28, 2015

If you haven’t read the children’s book, Stellaluna, then you are in for a treat. The Stellaluna activity and bat games we have to share today are fun ways to read the book and play with a bat theme, and the bat activities would work for a Halloween party with kids, too! Scroll on for Stellaluna games that teach and are fun!

Stellaluna Activity

Stellaluna book bat games including sight word games, math facts game, letter identification game. This is a fun twist on learning facts and words for preschoolers, kindergarten, and second grade, with a bat theme! I love the flashlight game!

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon is a sweet story of a bat who is adopted by a bird family after he is knocked from his mother’s grasp during a flight. We see how different and same the bat and the birds are and also notice the differences. We were able to talk about how we as family members are all the same, yet different, and how other people we meet or know might be different and do things differently, but inside we are all the same. Going on the theme of differences and similarities among the bat and his new bird family, we decided to examine sight words, Upper case letters, and numbers with bats! For more fun, make a bat craft to go along with your Stellaluna game, too!

While this is a great preschool book extension activity, the best thing about our Stellaluna game is that we modified it to fit the needs of my three older kids. We practiced upper case letter identification with the 3 year old preschooler, sight word identification with the Kindergartner, and math facts with the Second grader. The 16 month old just liked grabbing the bats from the wall. Very fun and age appropriate, but we’ll share more about what the older kids did today 😉

Bat Activity

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If you haven’t read the book Stellaluna, grab it up at your library! This was a new book to us, and one that I’m so glad we read.

First, print off this free printable bat stencil. Cut out the bat and trace it onto black cardstock paper. We cut out about 15 bats, but you can cut out as many bats as you need. It you’ll be practicing letters, you may want one for each letter of the alphabet.

Write on the bats with a white crayon. We practiced sight words first and wrote out the words my Kindergartener has been working on.

StellaLuna Activity for Sight Words

Tape the bats to the wall and get ready to play! First, we played a flashlight sight word activity as a warm-up. I read through a few pages of the book and when we got to a sight word, my son used the flashlight to find the matching sightword on the wall. He really got into this activity.

Next, to make it more of a game, we created a flashlight race. We pulled out a second flashlight and when we reached a sight word in the book, the two older kids raced to flash their light on the sight word. The first to light it up was the winner. Using the flashlights in a dark-ish room reminded us of Stellaluna flying at night and how the birds would need a flashlight to see.

StellaLuna Activity for Math Practice

To play the math facts game with my second grader, I wrote out numbers 10-20 on the bats. (Just flip the bats over and use the other side if you are playing more than one game! No need to cut out more bats, unless you need them.) Tape the numbered bats to the wall in a random arrangement. This game was fun for her to practice her math facts up to 20. I called out a number and then had her roll a die. She then had to add the number to the number that I called out and run over to the wall and hit the right number. We also did a round of subtraction. You can make this more of a game by adding a second player.

Bat Game for Letter Identification

For my preschooler, we wrote upper case letters on the bats and taped them to the wall. She played a version of the flashlight game as we scanned through the book. I pointed to a lower case letter and named it and she had to flash the light on the letter on the wall. We also practiced letter sounds by saying the sound the letter makes and she had to find the letter on the wall.

Scanning for the correct bat on the wall was a great way to incorporate visual scanning and visual perceptual skills into this learning game activity.