Quote Originally Posted by anatess View Post
We took all our snakes to both my sons' schools. Always for show-and-tell. We take the vivarium too. My 2nd grade son did the show-and-tell all by himself (my husband and I and my 5-year-old were props). He was GREAT! Nothing he said was inaccurate! But then, he knows these snakes better than I do. So, my 5-year-old joined him in the question and answer portion while my husband held the bigger snake for petting. I was holding the poster board... It was awesome because they got questions like, "do they eat people?", and my 5-year-old answers, "they don't fit in their mouths, silly!".

Then last week, my 5-year-old had his show-and-tell. So we did the same thing and my 5-year-old was supposed to do the show. It was scheduled for 15 minutes. He is in a montessori school so his class goes from 3-year-olds to 6-year-olds. Well, we set up the display 30 minutes before the show-and-tell and the whole school went on a riot because they don't get to see the snakes, so the principal decided to put all the classes together for the show-and-tell... there were 60+ kids there! My 5-year-old got intimidated so I did the show instead... the thing lasted for OVER AN HOUR! The really funny thing is all the kids were super excited and wanted to touch the snakes and everything while the teachers were scared. They jump out of their chairs everytime a kid gets too close to my older son who was holding the snake! We weren't prepared for so many kids, so it was a major disappointment that we couldn't let them touch the snakes. We only have 2 touchable snakes - the hognose is hissy, so might scare the kids, so he's just a "display" one. 60 kids for 2 snakes, I didn't feel comfortable with that... too much stress for the snakes, so we had to very politely tell everybody sorry!!! Ohhh... they were soooo disappointed you can just see the slump on their shoulders.

Oh, one crazy thing, one of the students asked, "does the ball python feel the same as the hognose?", and my 7-year-old said, "no, they are very different, the ball python is smooth while the hognose is keeled"... I'm thinking to myself, "killed? what in the world did my son just say?"... after the show-and-tell, I asked him why he said the hognosed got killed and he shook his head (ahh, 7-year-olds!) and said, "mom! keeled, like rough and dull and such...", I asked him to spell it and I still didn't know KEEL is an adjective. I only know it as a verb (tilted) or a noun (ship). I looked it up in the dictionary, and sure enough, there is no KEEL that means rough... So, I asked him where did you see that word? So he whips out his encyclopedia, Snakes of the Southeast by Gibbons and Dorcas, showed the page on hognoses and sure enough, it says Scales: KEELED. Now, how the heck did I not know that??? And why doesn't it appear in my Webster Dictionary?
Hee hee, yah the kids of today are very smart, sometimes leaving us oldies out in the cold