Henry The Bat’s First Night Alone

"Henry the Bat's first night alone" is a unique podcast because it is entirely spontaneous and unedited.  As such, it does not sound professional, but it is a great example of how story telling can be engaging to a child, especially when immediate and relevant. Max and I had just gone outside to look for bats in the sky.  We had seem then the evening before, but it was getting cooler and we did not see any this night.  We did here clicking and discussed the possibility that it could be a bat using echo location, or sonar.  I did not feel it was a good time or age to clarify that bat sonar is outside the range of human hearing. Dialog with the listener is great because it gives you time to prepare the next bits of the story in your head.  Be careful though, you can hear in this story how I got tripped-up when answering the question about the age of the bat.  I did not want to put an age on the bat for two reasons, (1) I don’t know how old bats get but I suspect not long and I did not want to get into relative age issues – at least for the moment, it is OK that Max think of all animals in terms of human ages, and (2) I did not want to scare Max into thinking that he would be on his own anytime soon. You might also wonder about the part of the story where the child says, “I’m going in to want Scooby-Doo.”  This actually happened – Max was trying to assert his way into watching television, which we had already agreed was not going to happen this night.  I thought it would be useful for Max to listen to it from the Bat’s perspective. In the end, I hope you enjoy this as a story, but more important, I hope you try story telling with your child and feel free to open the story to spontaneity and dialog which I believe are a wonderful platform for engagement and imagination.  Enjoy!