Snail Racing

Friday（16/04/2010）

a) Quiz: The Snail.
· I drew a picture of a snail. I asked the kids what they have learnt and observed.
Teacher: How many eyes does it have?
Yun Wen: 2 eyes on the longer antennas.
T: What’s the shorter antennas for?
Foo Soon: To smell and sense the surrounding.
T: Does it have legs?
Qian Joe: No.
T: It has muscular foot. What can you see after the snail crawls?
Devin: Saliva.
T: This saliva helps the snail to crawl more easily, even on sharp points; they don’t get hurt!
· It protects itself using its shell. It lays 80 – 100 eggs. The kids were shocked that its mother doesn’t care for its kids. Now, they learnt that animals are divided into 2 types, the caring and non-caring ones.
· Farmers dislike them because they eat their plants fast. They guessed the number of teeth but they didn’t get the right figure. A snail is the slowest animal but with the most teeth about 14,ooo that grow on the tongue called “radula”. Wow!

b) Snail Racing
· Zhe Qing brough a very active and nice adult garden snail. We found an adult snail, two smaller snails and a baby snail from our school garden. We labeled each snail with a sticker and the kids gather to see which snail would crawl the fastest.
· The baby snail came out from the shell but didn’t move. Zhe Qing’s snail was very active , moving fast. I even used the leaves to lure the others but they didn’t want to come out from the shell. Probably because we kept them the whole afternoon in a container; thus were frightened by the kids’ voices. Thus, we thought maybe they would be active again once left in the garden. We went downstairs and true enough, all the snails came out from the shells and started crawling. Now, we learnt that animals live actively and happily at their habitat.