24th meeting

Our today's story: "Stellaluna" by by Janell Cannon

Today was a special day for our Bookworks Book Club because for the first time one of the book club members had taken the responsibility of sharing a book with us! Imaan had brought along one of her favourite books "Stellaluna", which she read to the rest of us.

The story was about a little baby bat by name of Stellaluna, who got lost and ended up being raised by a bird in her nest along with her other little birdies. Stellaluna had to do all things the way birds do - eat insects, which she didn't like at all, and instead of sleeping by hanging upside down, as bats do, sleep like birds do in their nest.

Later, Stellaluna met some other bats, who said to her that it was OK to sleep by hanging upside down, because she was a bat. Stellaluna also discovered that she was a fruit-bat, which explained why she hadn't liked the insects the birds were eating. She learned that she could see very well at night and that her hearing was extremely sensitive - she could move aroun with the help of echolocation (bats make sounds and listen to them coming back in echo for judgeing the distance to objects around them). At the end of the story, Stellaluna was lucky enough to find her mother again!

After the story, Imaan's mother helped us to discover some more interesting facts about bats. We got to know, for example, that bats are mammals (their babies are born alive and drink milk) and that fruit-bats find their food by following the smell of it. What was even more fun, we ourselves could try becoming bats by using our senses of smell and hearing! We did two interesting activities. First, Imaan's mother divided us into pairs. One of us had to close our eyes, while the other gave to the first one some fruit to smell. We had to guess blindfolded, what kind of fruit it was - just like bats recognize and find fruits with the sense of their smell! The second activity was for our ears. With the help of a wall, a big lound-ticking clock and some empty kitchen towel rolls, Imaan's mother set up a small experiment, in which we could hear the echo of the clock's ticking, as it bounced off from the wall!

The pictures below show some of the facts we learned about bats: 1) bats are active during the dark hours (at night); 2) bats have good eyesight at night; 3) bats sleep by hanging upside down and wrapping their wings around them; 4) bats have sensitive sense of hearing and use echolocation.