Racing Rodents, Rock-like Reptiles
Required Responsibility, Respect, Regard
so helping to nurture and train kinder, thoughtful children.
I was lucky that I grew up in school classrooms that had animals there to be cared for by us as pupils. Now days many classrooms are devoid of "pets" for health and safety reasons and I think this lessens the ability for children to understand how as "superior" beings we should look after the other animals on the planet. There is also the well documented phenomena of may of our most challenging pupils being very caring and quiet around animals especially when given the responsibility of taking care of them.
Did you have classroom "pets"? Do you think animals should be in a classroom environment? Were you the animal monitor? Did you ever get to look after the class pet during the holidays? Leave a comment below because I sure would like to know :)
Wow, classroom pets? None of my schools had pets. I've never heard of that. Maui Jungalow
ReplyDeleteIt just shows how different things happen in different places - always interesting to learn :)
DeleteNo classroom pets, but we had a subject called 'nature study' - required us to bring back butterfly eggs and watch them transform into caterpillars and finally into butterflies, and the same with frog spawn. And there were snakes :) which co-existed happily within the school premises (this was West Africa in places and times when the animal life wasn't completely dispossessed by human population yet)
ReplyDeleteBest wishes,
Nilanjana.
Madly-in-Verse
Yes we also watched frog spawn turn into little frogs and some of the early years (at schools I taught at) had butterfly life-cycles in their classrooms :)
DeleteI adore cats and dogs and animals in general but don't like to see some in cages especially at school. We at school had mice and at the time I thought it cruel. Mybe I'm old fashioned.
ReplyDeleteYvonne.
I don't think it is old fashioned at all to think about animal welfare, Yvonne and obviously animals in schools need to be very well looked after. In my experience it was usually gerbils and hamsters and they seemed to like the attention they received but I am sure all animals would prefer to be free if given a choice :)
DeleteWhen I was in Kindergarten, we had chicks and ducklings in our classroom. I guess that’s what happens when you live in rural farm country. One of my sister’s classrooms had geckos. Our library in elementary school had a fish tank with one fish. (Because that one fish ate all the other fish.) My mom was a teacher, and her classroom had butterflies. They set the butterflies free when they got big enough.
ReplyDeleteAj @ Read All The Things!
Lots of different animals - geckos in the classroom sounds interesting :)
ReplyDeleteI was just telling my kids about classroom pets a week or two ago, and they were shocked that such things once were allowed. The one I remember best was a ferret we had in our high school biology room. A lively fellow!
ReplyDeleteWe never had classroom pets :-)
ReplyDeleteI would have loved to have a guinea pig or a puppy :-)
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