Nocturnal Animals

After the lesson on our own night time routines (I know, I’m out of order!) we had a lesson all about nocturnal animals.  Here in the dessert this lesson is quite apropos since there are more nocturnal than diurnal animals.  I got a few books from the library and we looked at the pictures and talked about some of the different animals and the senses they use to navigate in the dark.

Before I talk about the rest of our activities, here’s pictures I hijacked from the Sonoran Desert Museum that show many of our desert animals in the day and the night so you can get a feel for how busy our nights can get!  I highly recommend going to their site (link in previous sentence in case you missed it…) because you can arrow over the animals in the pictures to find out their names (the Mule Deer is named Clancy… check it out!).

After that brief discussion we turned off the lights and closed the blinds so we could test some of our senses in the dark!

Owls: We played simple hide and seek in the dark.  The owl kept her hands in binoculars over her eyes because owls can see well in the dark and ‘flew’ around the room looking for ‘mice’ to catch and eat.  All of the mice hid under the kitchen sink every time.

Bats: Another version of hide and seek, the bat was blindfolded (even though they can see well in the dark they use echo-location to get around) and all the bugs stood still and squeeked until they were caught.

Fox: To practice using our sense of smell the kids got blindfolded and led to plates with…. stuff on them (Cheese, oranges, soap and rocks).  They then had to tell just by smelling whether it would be good to eat or not.

Raccoons: These critters have a great ability to feel around in the dark to find a tasty treat.  For this activity I filled a large bowl with water and put in some glass googlies, grapes and other random objects.  The blindfolded child had to reach in and find something to eat.

For snack time we got to eat all of our findings and then some.

To wrap it all up the kids got a dark blue sheet of paper with a moon and this sheet of nocturnal animals to color and cut out.

 

I had included the diurnal animals (that I can’t get to display just now) but just nocturnal was more than enough to keep them busy for the whole of their attention span.