Making a Snail Habitat for Virginia and Leavy the Snails!

Rainy days always leave me wondering how we are going to fill the day, especially in the summer! My littlest one is obsessed (really, truly, obsessed) with snails-she loves to find one and have it crawl up her body while I watch in a mixture of disgust and amazement. My not-so-littlest one pointed out one day that snails only come out after it rains-and suddenly, a science lesson was born! Upon perusing the Internet, I realized that making snail habitats is a common activity for students in  Grade 1 in Ontario- my guess is it is because snails run rampant around here-more so than students in certain parts of Ontario, I'm sure! I decided to take the opportunity to highlight a set of different literacy skills in this "science-based" activity as I always try my best to create multidisciplinary lessons whenever I see the opportunity. In this case, I found a blog post describing how to create a snail habitat and had my students (children) pick apart or analyze the "story" for the key pieces of information we needed:

I decided that given the emphasis on the new "Bloom's Taxonomy" for a digital society, http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom's+Digital+Taxonomy, to approach this lesson in a way that allows the opportunity to research a subject, analyze the information provided and come up with an appropriate course of action in building our "snail habitat". Since all of the P.D. days I have attended (not to mention to the courses I have been lucky enough to participate in) have emphasized that "learning in a digital age" requires both the ability to research and analyze the information found, I believe that any opportunity that I can find that helps to facilitate the learning/mastering of this skill set should be exploited.

Once we figured out what we needed in order to make our snail habitat, off we went in search of materials in true scavenger hunt-like fashion, crossing things off as we "acquired" them:

When we had everything we needed, snails included, we headed home to make our first habitat, which, if I do say so myself, is a pretty fine looking habitat, fit for even the best of snails:

Our habitat is currently occupied by 2 snails, Leavy the girl-aptly named because she likes to eat leaves, and Virginia the boy snail-no explanation given for that one. I figure I will wait to discuss how some things on earth have both boy and girl parts! As of today, they have survived 4 days in their new home-personally I figure if they last a week, which is longer then most of our fish do, then this project will be deemed a success!