Living Root Garden School • Creatures Great & Small • Name: ______________________
🔍 The Case
The case of the fluttering shadows — as the birds settle down for the night, fluttery shapes appear over the yard. Birds, or something else?
Watch at dusk, when the birds are mostly done for the day. Bats come out as the light fades, fluttering around trees and streetlights, snapping up mosquitoes and moths — a single free-tailed bat can eat hundreds of insects in one night.
Look at how it flies: bats fly with hand-wings — stretched skin over arm bones and extra-long finger bones, a hand remodelled into a wing. Their flight looks fluttery and looping, not like a bird's steady flapping.
Listen for what you cannot hear: bats hunt with echolocation — they shout in sounds too high for humans to hear, and the echo bouncing off an insect tells them exactly where dinner is. It is seeing with ears, and a bat can catch a mosquito in total darkness, mid-flight, using only echoes.
Rule out the lookalikes: flying squirrels only glide, they do not flap — a flapping mammal at dusk is a bat. And the rule is firm: never touch a bat, ever. A bat on the ground is not a pet — leave it alone and tell a grown-up to call animal control.
Ask: Twenty minutes at dusk — how many bats will fly over your yard, and when will the first one appear? Write your guess before you look up.
Try: With a grown-up, watch the sky at dusk for twenty minutes and count every bat. Write down the time the first one appears and whether each bat flies fast and straight or fluttery and looping.
Stretch (Teens & Growers ready for more): Find out which bats live near you — free-tailed bats are Florida's most common, evening bats are the backyard regulars, and the Florida bonneted bat lives only in South Florida. Then design a bat-house placement plan, builder-style: high, sunny, near water and trees.
Tell: Fill in the log below — how many bats, when the first one appeared, how each one flew — then finish this sentence in words or a labeled drawing: “The first bat flew ___ because ___.”
Date
What I saw
What surprised me
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
🛠️ Build It
Draw the first bat you saw at dusk — fast and straight, or fluttery and looping?
🗣️ Be the Teacher
Tell someone how a bat finds a mosquito in the dark — in your own words, no reading off the packet.
🏅 I can…
☐ I can tell a bat from a bird at dusk.
Portfolio check
☐ Guide read
☐ Case solved
☐ Ask, Try, Tell done
☐ Build It filed: Dusk log + placement plan
☐ Taught someone
☐ Badge earned: I can tell a bat from a bird at dusk.
Living Root Garden School • livingrootgarden.com/homeschool/ • Free — print as many copies as you like. File this sheet with your portfolio log. Sprouts do the Read, the Case, and Build It; Growers try the Ask, Try, Tell stretch when ready; Teens do the whole packet — including teaching it back.