The Bat House

A lunchtime discussion about the bat house in the garden turned into an interesting discovery project. We noticed as we looked up at the bat house at the top of a telephone pole that it is no longer inhabited and posited that perhaps that’s because three sides were missing and there was no place to hang from. So we began to talk about what we knew about bats and their habits: they hibernate, have legs too weak to run on so they must hang upside down to launch themselves, the vast majority feast on mosquitos or fruit rather than human blood and that they really like dark cosy spaces with secret entrances at the bottom.

One of the children decided we should fix up the bat house and, eager to get started right away, ran over to a pile of wood sitting under the treehouse. Another child said we needed to plan the structure first so all the kids spent half an hour around a huge sheet of paper we taped down to the deck and each gave their ideas on what features should be added to Casa Bat. Interestingly, most of the conversation focused on how to attract, trap and keep warm the mosquitoes the bats would like to eat.

I then asked the kids to switch one position to the right around the drawing and share something they liked about the design drawn by the person next to them. From this, we discussed our final design and I’m really not sure how we could ever construct such a fantastical creation. The collaborative sum was an elaborate system of an “eye” mechanism at the top that would sense the presence of mosquitoes and draw them in where “jaws” of doors open to the sky would close trapping them in a series of smokestack-like chambers where the bats could help themselves to a meal anytime they liked. The whole interior would be lined with French knitting sewn together with buttons (“knitting” and “sewing on a button” are Montessori casa tasks). There was a hanging apparatus underneath to launch from and an elaborate system of windows to open in the summer and close in the winter and of course it was decided that a mosquito should be painted on the outside and “sound waves” broadcast to attract the bat to the house.

For architectural inspiration, we finished our lunch hour by gathering in the casa and reading Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrew Beaty and David Roberts about a little boy who also had marvellous architectural vision.