Bats are a popular learning lesson here – especially during the month of October for Halloween. But bats are a fascinating animal worth learning about all year! Enjoy our free printable bat life cycle hat template below as well as other free bat resources for learning!

Every summer we have about six bats that fly over our property every night and we LOVE going out to watch them! We did put up a bat house a few years ago but haven’t had any luck with them living there yet. Learning about bats is a fascinating subject to study.

One place I’ve learned a lot about bats is taking cave tours! Not all caves have bats, in fact out of 40+ cave tours that I’ve been on I’ve only ever seen a bat in a cave one time! (Except for Carlsbad Caverns – you can actually watch bats fly out of the cave entrance each evening – but you won’t find bats while you are hiking through the cave.) 

This interactive bat life cycle printable hat template will let you not only decorate a hat you can wear but also lets kids manipulate the stages of the bat life cycle!

Where to see bats in the United States:

Last year we drove to Carlsbad Caverns where we learned SO MUCH about bats! They have an amazing program called “Bat Flight” every afternoon (seasonally) where you can sit in an amphitheater in front of the cave entrance and watch the bats fly out every night at sunset.

Another really awesome place to see bats is in Austin, Texas off of the Congress Bridge. Millions of bats live under the bridge and fly out every night! You can see them by walking onto the bridge in the evening, or taking a river cruise underneath the bridge! Both are amazing choices.

Bats can actually be found on almost every single continent and live in caves, trees, bat houses, bridges, and other nooks and crannies!

Interesting Bat Facts:

1. There are over 1000 species of bats!

2. Some bats can fly up to 250 miles in a single night!

3. Some bats can reach speeds of 60 miles per hour!

4. The largest bat (flying fox) has a wingspan of up to 6 feet!

5. On average bats live about 20 years.

Our printable bat life cycle hat required a minimal amount of cutting and pasting! If you’re using this for younger grades you’ll probably need an adult on hand to help size the hat as many of the heads I’ve measured for these hats have needed an additional strip of construction paper to make the hat bigger.

I recommend letting the kids color their hat templates as well as their bat tokens. Once they have finished coloring they can cut out their hat and bat tokens, then paste the tokens in the right order onto their hat! 

Lastly you’ll want to tape or staple the hat together to fit the child’s head size.

At the bottom of this post you’ll find some of our free bat learning resources and printables, but here are a few more than I found online that will help you extend your unit studies on bats.

• Flying Bat Straw Rockets

• Coffee Filter Bats

• Paper Plate Flying Bat   

• Bat Spoon Craft 

PRINT HERE: Bat Life Cycle Hat Template

 

MORE FREE Bat Printables & Resources:

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