RAHWAY PROGRESS (Union, New Jersey) 09 November 05 A cold- blooded lesson (Kitty Wilder)
For many people, spending an afternoon petting snakes wouldn’t be ideal, but for students at Franklin Elementary School, hanging out with cold-blooded creatures last week couldn’t have been cooler.
Second-graders at the school had a chance to see and touch snakes and turtles indigenous to New Jersey on Friday, when a traveling eco-lab from Trailside Nature and Science Center in Mountainside stopped by for a lesson.
Rahway’s Franklin Elementary School was the mobile lab’s first-ever stop. The environmental education classroom is a new county program created by converting a surplus van.
Trailside Park naturalists Ginger Case and Joe Filo used the van to bring a lesson about reptiles to the students, who listened excitedly as they sat on carpet squares under a tree outside the school.
First came an overview of what it means to be a reptile. For starters, reptiles hatch their offspring from eggs. Secondly, reptiles are cold-blooded. And finally, Case told the students, reptiles are covered in scales, which feel similar to human fingernails.
“Imagine your entire body covered in fingernails,” she told the students, who responded with an enthusiastic, “Ewww!”
Next, Case focused her lesson on two types of turtles. The first was the painted turtle, which is common in New Jersey lakes and rivers and has webbed toes and a flat shell, so he is “zippy” in the water, Case explained.
The second, called the box turtle, lives in local fields and meadows and can’t swim, but instead uses his claws to dig in the ground when he needs to.
To illustrate some interesting facts about turtles, Case pulled out two turtle shells for the children to examine and touch.
The shells were left behind by turtles who have died, Case explained, similar to dinosaurs who leave their bones behind.
Knocking on the shells, the students let out a few “Oooo’s” a couple of “Ouches.” But the bigger surprise came moments later when Cast revealed two live turtles.
Not expecting the chance to touch a real turtle, some of the young students let out a scream, while others yelled, “Cool!”
Case and Filo brought the turtles around to the students who gently touched the reptiles with one finger, feeling the shells, legs and claws.
The hands-on lesson had the students squirming with excitement as Filo brought them a second lesson, this time on snakes.
Snakes, who don’t have shells or legs like turtles, do have a special set of jaws and teeth to swallow their prey in one piece, Filo told the students. Backward-facing teeth keep prey from escaping a snake’s mouth, while specially designed jaws allow a snake to open its mouth wide enough to swallow large meals.
Filo told the students that, if they had the same set of jaws, “You could swallow the head of the person next to you.”
After having a chance to feel a couple of different snake skins shed from local snakes, Filo told the students he had brought a couple of “friends” with him.
Reaching into a pillow case, Filo pulled out “Cornelius,” a small corn snake found in southern New Jersey. His arrival drew plenty of excited screams from the young crowd.
By the time Filo was ready to introduce the students to his second “friend,” the group was already chanting, “Let’s go snake, let’s go snake!”
When Filo unveiled Piney, a 6-foot-long northern pine snake, the students screamed even louder, looking at their neighbors in disbelief and gasping with stunned smiles.
After learning a little bit about the snakes, such as where they live, what they eat, and how their coloring helps them to survive in natural environments, the students had a chance to touch the two snakes, cautiously petting the scaly skin.
After the program, Heather Sherrier, 7, had learned many new facts about both turtles and snakes, but, she said, the snakes were cooler to see.
“They have, like, a ton of scales and use their tongues to smell,” she said. Sherrier wasn’t afraid to touch Piney. Her observation of the snake: “It felt really squishy.”
A cold- blooded lesson