This fun bat game, with a printable template,  is the perfect pairing for any bat-themed unit or Halloween activity. The assembled game teaches letter recognition, number recognition, and helps to develop fine motor skills!

Bat Cave Number & Letter Recognition Printable

Materials:

• printable bat template (at bottom of page)
• printer paper
• empty tissue box
• black construction paper, 3-4 sheets
• scissors
• white crayon, piece of white chalk, white chalk marker
• clear tape

To begin, print out the bat template. Place the template on top of a stack of 3-4 sheets of black construction paper. Carefully holding the template in place, cut out the bats. There are 4 bats in the template, which will leave you with 12-16 bats. If your template slips a bit, don’t worry. These do not have to be perfect!

Once all of the bats have been cut, use a white crayon, chalk or chalk marker to write a letter or number onto the bat’s belly. Just choose whatever letters and/or numbers your kids are currently working on. Depending on their skill level, you can include a variety of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, number words or sight words.

Next, fold each wing of the bat across its belly to hide what’s been written. Opening the bat wings to read what’s inside will help the kids hone their fine motor skills and add to fun of the game!

You can use the activity just like this, or you can create a simple bat cave to house all of your adorable bats. To make the cave, use clear tape to wrap a tissue box in black construction paper. Then, poke scissors through the large hole in the box and cut along the perimeter to expose the opening. If desired, you can decorate your cave with spare bats.

To play the game, put all of the bats inside the cave. Then, have your kids reach into the box, choose a mystery bat and unfold the wings to reveal a written surprise. After the kids unfold their bat wings, have them read the letter, number or sight word aloud. Happy learning!