Stellaluna is the perfect book to read during the month of October for Halloween! One thing I like about this book is that it gives many details about bats and how they live. It introduces vocabulary words like echolocation and nocturnal. This would be a good book to read aloud with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders. The teacher could do a KWL chart and introduce the new vocabulary before reading and add these words to the word wall. The students could make "bat hats" out of black construction paper to wear while the teacher reads the book aloud! The students could do a book study/animal study for bats! Another cute idea with Stellaluna is to give the students an outline of a bat for them to color however they'd like (this could serve as an extension of a lesson). We could hang them up on the ceiling to have a "bat cave."

Lexile Level: AD550L

This book is definitely geared toward those who are already familiar with the basic tenets of evolution, but who don't really have it driven home.

The author uses anthropological evidence behind how things came to be, as well as biological factors as to why animals are distributed the way they are. It's an interesting hodge podge of anthropology, biology, chemistry, and history. I strongly recommend it for high school students to read it as a method to hammer home the fact that evolution is real. It would also be good reading for a homeschooled child to demonstrate how evolution works. However, it's written in such a way that adults would like it too without feeling like it's a textbook.