Snail’s Pace

…the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school.

…so wrote Shakespeare [in As You Like It] I went off to school yesterday with a ‘shining morning face’ – but quite willingly, very grateful for the unexpected opportunity of a day’s supply teaching.

The Year 2 children I worked with were wonderful! They had been researching snails earlier in the week, and their morning task was to prepare an information sheet about these gastropods.

I learned some amazing facts, which I will share with you

The biggest snail in the world was found in Africa, Miss

It was 15 inches long, no, 15 metres, or was it 15 centimetres ?

[Nobody was quite sure of the answer to that!]

And what about these gems of information…

Snails are mainly eaten by Frenchmen and birds

Snails are deft because they have no ears

Snails can lay eggs without mating, and they are “Maphrodites”

The one fact they all remembered was

“If you pour salt on a snail, it will DIE!”

The afternoon involved RE, and the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah

I was fine with this, but a little confused by the material I was given to work with. After I had told the story of Antiochus Epiphanes, Judas Maccabeus, the desecration of the Temple, and the miraculous provision of oil, we were supposed to go to the ICT Suite and use an interactive RE programme.

I had been pronouncing the baddie’s name as “Ann-Tie-O-Cuss” – but the video clip the children were watching called him instead “Anti – Ockers”. I told the class that I thought that the man on the video was wrong!

The class did some great role play, acting out the story. One little girl got quite carried away scrubbing the Temple clean of all the pig’s blood! Another got really concerned as he hunted for fresh oil – “What if the light goes out and God leaves us?”

We finished up talking about modern day Hannukah celebrations, the menorahs, the potato latkes, the gold coins, and the dreidels, and they all learned to say

A Great Miracle Happened There!

I had a lovely day – I hope the children did too! Now I have this overwhelming urge to make some delicious, but fattening potato latkes or Sufganiyot!