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...