INDIANAPOLIS STAR (Indiana) 24 September 07 Furless friends fascinate - Teachers find that turtles, snails, frogs and fish help put science across to curious kids (Linda Lombardi)
(AP): Angel's gone back to school again. He doesn't have a new backpack or a brown-bag lunch, but that's OK -- because Angel's a turtle owned by kindergarten teacher Vanessa Santamaria.
Santamaria chose a turtle for her class at Our Community School in North Hills, Calif., partly because she is allergic to pets with fur. But aside from that benefit, teachers are finding that class pets from the world of the scaly, slimy and buggy can be just as fascinating for kids as a traditional hamster or guinea pig.
Connie Norgren, a retired elementary teacher who taught for 31 years in Brooklyn, N.Y., says that one of her most memorable pets was a garter snake, named Chris after the owner of the store where it was bought. The snake was the children's idea, but Norgren, reluctant at first, was soon converted.
"If we were going to have a pet snake, we were going to get used to him," she says. "So we took him out every morning, and he got used to being held."
Norgren didn't settle for the easy snake enclosure lined with paper. "We tried to make the tank as natural and inviting as possible. We put branches he could wind around. It's labor-intensive."
Chris ate live goldfish, which were always available in a container of water in his tank. Many other pets of this type also eat live food, which makes for a lesson in itself.
Nancy Fallo, a kindergarten teacher in the Bronx, N.Y., who has had bullfrogs, says, "We had a discussion about how some animals will only eat live bugs. We got a little bit into the food chain -- big bugs eat smaller bugs."
But bugs aren't just food: Teachers are enthusiastic about them as class pets in themselves.
"I love bugs," says Fallo. "We do the life cycle of a mealworm," using kits you can buy to watch the transformation into beetles. Similar kits are available for other insects like butterflies and praying mantises, allowing students to see animals change into totally different forms -- something a furry mammal will never do for you.
And for some of these creatures you don't need to buy a thing. Sometimes, Norgren says, "I just dug up a whole bunch of backyard creatures and put them in a tank. There is a whole universe of living things even in a city."
Norgren used pillbugs, slugs -- "the kids LOVE them," she says -- and snails, one of her favorites: "Each is very individual -- the shells are all different. They have babies -- they're very tiny, about a millimeter big. They leave wonderful slime when they walk along your arm. The kids love facts like they can glide along sharp pieces of stone -- that's what the slime is for."
As expected, animals in class help teach natural history, and lessons in how to care for an animal are important as well. But it doesn't stop there.
Norgren likes fish and turtles, which live in water, because of "the kinds of things you can learn by looking through the tank -- refraction, and you can see reflections." And because water temperatures are important for the health of the animal, it gives kids "a real reason to get familiar with a thermometer."
Santamaria's students learn how to measure the length of Angel's shell and the tank he lives in. And even naming Fallo's goldfish, Goldy and Midnight, was a math lesson.
"We let them vote," she says, "then put it on a graph, then whatever name gets the most boxes colored in, that's the name that we pick."
Some lessons are unanticipated, such as the time the children in Santamaria's class were building a play area for Angel on the floor. Impatient, they decided to put the turtle down before they were finished.
"Angel immediately began to quickly walk toward the gaps in the play area. You can imagine 20 5-year-olds in a state of panic pointing to the turtle -- a few trying to run after it. After the chaos they all agreed to quickly finish building and as they built we discussed what happened."
In addition to the lesson about patience and planning ahead, the children learned something about not trusting cliches: one student asked, "Aren't turtles supposed to be really slow and that is why people say that you are like a turtle when you are slow?"
But maybe the most important lesson is appreciation of the life around us, no matter how small.
"I learned to love mealworms -- you look at them through a magnifying class and see their little legs and their funny face," says Norgren. "One of the things I learned from this is that anything you study closely you learn to love."
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070924/LIVING/709240317/-1/LOCAL17
