Every year the children are fascinated with snails and oh what joy it is to fossick in the garden or bush and find these slippery little creatures …

(who are not one bit interested in being found).

We have plenty of snails around at the moment with our continuing wet weather.

You’ve got to love snails – they are gentle, fascinating, plentiful and do wonderful things like crawl over your hands.

They are very curious little critters and are absolutely fascinating to watch close up.

Look at those antennae!

The children were fascinated by the speed at which these little critters could actually escape from their “prison” …

and then of course there were the squeals of horror when they thought their snails were going to “crash” into each other …

Arrrrgh! “Will they fight ?!”

Clearly these gentle creatures had everything under control. It was like watching a well choreographed, dance routine!

The children jumped up and down cheering at the realization that none of the snails got hurt …

as they made their bid for freedom!

Unfortunately for the snails, freedom was pretty short lived as it was only seconds before the children scooped them up again and popped them back into their “prison”!

Walter Cronkite once said – “There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free or you are not free.”

Fortunately by the end of the afternoon, after the children had finished ‘playing’ with their “new pets”, they agreed that all snails should be all free and set them back in the garden!

Our children’s most popular board games is Snail’s Pace Race. It’s one of those great games that requires no adult explanation, intervention, supervision or interruption! 

It’s a very easy game which the children can play on their own,

with one friend …

or in a group. 

It has a dice with colours corresponding to the colours of the snails.

Sometimes the children choose a snail which becomes theirs to race while at other times they move the snail corresponding to the colour they throw on the dice.

We like to encourage them to set the rules before they start playing!

To keep the game interesting, we provide the children with a selection of different objects they can use, which correspond to the colours on the board.

You’d be amazed at what you can find inside other games in your store room to mix and match!

The children could make their own game by drawing or ruling segmented columns on a piece of paper. In fact you could even make a giant sized version of it on a long piece of paper and the children can be the ‘snails’ … Or draw it in chalk on the concrete outside … Hmmm  … haven’t tried those ideas ourselves yet … but we definitely will!

Quite a few of our families are heading off for holidays at the moment, mostly to sunny spots such as Fiji or Queensland. As the children’s interest in snails hasn’t waned, we asked them what sort of holiday a snail would have considering they move so slowly. The sorts of ideas the children came up with were “The next plant” or “The next door neighbours”.

We asked them to think about what sort of holiday they would like to go on if they were snails and they came up with some great destination ideas like; the moon, the supermarket, Queensland, Fairyland, the beach, the footy and the city!

They drew their snails, …

… some drew their holiday destination too.

Then an adult wrote the holiday story out for them …

… if they couldn’t do it themselves.

One child who wrote his own said, “I wanted my snail to go to the circus, but I didn’t know the word. Then I thought he could go to church, but I didn’t know the word, so he is going to the farm because I DID know that word!“

At the end of each session the children read out their own stories to the others.

Then we made their stories into books …

…  for everyone to enjoy.

Collective nouns can be beautiful and evocative, even poetic!

Like the collective noun for snails …

… ‘an ascargatoire’ of snails!  How magnificent is that?!

Then there is also a rout of snails and a walk of snails

Here’s an nice, simple poem we taught the children about snails.

If you get excited about collective nouns like we do, or simply enjoy learning new and interesting language, visit our ‘collective nouns’ link, and like us you may just discover a whole new language!

Following on from our fun with spirals, a child brought in a snail to show us the spiral shape on its shell.

That started an avalanche – it must be a good time of year for snails, particularly in the Agapanthus we were told, and many unsuspecting snails found themselves at kinder with us!

We have a small aquarium with a lid, so we added tan bark, soil, rocks and tree bark and that became their new home.

As you may know (if you have left your letters in the letter box too long) snails eat paper, so not only do we feed them lettuce and other munchies, we pop a piece of damp paper over the top of them before we head off home and that keeps them going all night.

It is interesting how fascinating such a ‘garden variety’ creature can be close up.

We placed magnifying glasses next to the snail house …

… and now they have children constantly checking up on them.

A great website you can visit for fascinating facts and information on the garden snail is through our ‘Garden Snails‘ link.

Today one of the children found The Slimy Book by Babette Cole on the library shelf and noticing the picture of a snail on the front cover wanted to know what the book was about.

As slime, snails and spirals are very popular amongst the children at the moment it seemed the perfect choice for a group story.

It is one of those nonsense books which the children love.

They love the descriptive language and the way the words rhyme.

The story had the children using language like “that’s so gross”, and “disgusting’, and  “that would be so yuk!” accompanied by plenty of chuckles and laughter.

Watching their reactions to the book was delightful. Nothing is dull when you spend your days with children!

When we were watching a snake from Wild Action crawl back into its bag, the children noticed how it curled itself around and around. After a bit of discussion they decided he had made a spiral shape. As a large group we held hands in a line and made a spiral with our bodies. As we had had a think about where we find spirals in nature, the children were aware that snails have a spiral shell, so we sang this little song as we went around -

“Snail, snail, snail, snail, goes around and round and round.”

We gave the children the opportunity to create their own spirals as a precursor to a science activity we will be doing soon.

It is a lot of cutting which needs to be fairly exact and we were excited at how well they did.

They were very pleased with the end results.

We brought in a big basket of apples and the apple peeler/slicer which most schools seem to have in their classrooms, or are available for about $25 in shops like “House”.

The machine peels off the skin …

… slices the apple into a spiral and decores it.

Besides the obvious gross motor activity, what a lot of maths language we heard – put the apple on, wind it forwards/backwards, it’s cutting around, is it finished, look at the spiral peel/apple …

A wonderful by product of this discovery of spirals is that the children start seeing them all around them …

… eg; a shell which is at the play dough table …

… having fun with magnetic play …

… in the finger paint …

… and how you can make beautiful spirals in slime!