Sliding into a Snail Inquiry!

You are probably wondering how on earth we went from a growing plants inquiry to now a snail inquiry in our classroom. This is what is so intriguing about an inquiry based learning environment, you never know where the children's interests will take us! As we were having a whole group conversation about different types of gardens we could have in our classroom, garden snails was brought up. So we decided to look into what it would take to have a snail garden in our classroom. I called Petsmart but they only had aquatic snails available at this time of the year. I also contacted my 13 year old nephew who has a few aquariums and loves aquatic life. He had told me that garden snails were hibernating right now but we were more than welcome to have a couple of his aquatic snails. Who doesn't like something that is free?! I didn't want to disappoint the students so although we couldn't have garden snails in our classroom in the middle of February we could still have snails that live in water! Let's see where this will take us!

A couple students painting a sign for our snail garden table



Painting our insect rocks

 

 

I saw this really cute idea on Pinterest to paint rocks like little bumblebees and ladybugs. I bought a bunch of stones from Dollarama and did an example of how to paint the rocks so the children could use them as a guide. The students could choose which insect they wanted to paint on their own rock. After our rocks dried our plan was to add them to our own clay snail display that we were going to put on  our snail garden table. 

Cute insect stones painted by the students.

Slinky the snail display

The students molded their own snail from modelling clay and added natural items such as twigs, leaves and rocks. They also used grass from their own grass cups that they were growing to add to their snail display. After, they glued their insect rock on and named their snail.
 

A student's snail display

On our snail table we left a couple markers and this "I wonder..." chart for the students to fill in on their own time. At first the children didn't have too many things that they wondered about but as we had our aquatic snails in our classroom for about a week more questions were arising.

Our completed snail garden

Snail Babies!

After coming back to school from the weekend our snails had babies! We decided not to tell the children and let them discover this amazing creation of life themselves. While one of the students was looking at the aquarium they asked me if the snails had babies. I told him I wasn't sure but maybe we could look in our snail book to see if that is what snail babies look like. We found a picture of baby snails in the book and compared that to our baby snails in the classroom. He had decided that they were definitely baby snails. It was really cute to see how excited he was to share this information with the rest of the peers in the class. It was priceless to see the look of amazement on the kid's faces as they swarmed around the snail table to see with their own eyes that our snails had babies... 40 of them!

A list of what snails eat. Now the students can bring food in from home to feed the snails.

Having a snail inquiry in our classroom not only covers some of the science expectations but it has also touched on some math (estimating how many baby snails we think there are), literacy skills (making lists, writing questions, reading non-fiction text), as well as visual arts (creating our clay snails and painting our insect rocks). Now what shall we do with all these snails??!!! I guess we need to investigate things a little further...

Beautiful Flowers



Show and Share Found Materials

As our show and share activity for the month of January each student was asked to bring in a bag with found materials from around the house that the class could reuse. We would give a brown paper lunch bag with a note attached that described what types of materials we were looking for and what we were going to do as a class with the found materials to whoever was the "special person" the next school day. During show and share time the special person would choose a few items and describe what it was and where they found it. Some bags had a lot of items so the special person would usually only show a few things. We let the class know that when we sorted all the bags at the end of the month it would be a surprise to see what was left in the bags!

 

Sorting the Found Materials

At the end of the month when each student had brought in their "beautiful stuff" we separated the class into 2 groups to sort everything. The ECE in the classroom had one group and I had the other. Ahead of time we had collected clear plastic containers (vegetable/fruit containers) to sort the found materials. Let me tell you it definitely took a lot longer than expected to sort as the children were so intrigued by the various items! It was really fascinating to listen to their conversations with one another about the items and the many questions they had. A lot of children were asking what some of the items were and what they were used for. Others were pretending they were something completely different than what it was (a hair clip became a dinosaur for one little boy). Some children became attached to items and didn't want to put them in the bin (especially the beautiful broken jewelry pieces). When we were done sorting, we labelled each container and they were organized on the shelves at the art centre for the students to explore on their own and to make pieces of art from.

Making a collage with the sorted items.

Creating beautiful flower art pieces from found materials

After the found materials were on the art shelf for the students to freely explore for about a week we decided to do a class art project with each child. Right now we are doing a growing plants investigation and we had just planted some spring flowers in a tray and added it to our indoor garden centre. To tie in with our investigation we decided to create some beautiful flowers from our found materials.

Exploring and choosing items to create our flower pictures



Completed art piece

 While the students were creating their pictures I would take photographs of the process and document their thinking.

 

Class finished art project "Beautiful Flowers" on display.