Animals arrived today! - Cockroaches!

You may not think so but cockroaches are very clean!  They clean up and eat all the dead and decomposing things in their area!  The boys have bumps on their exoskeletons and the girls have flat exoskeleton.

Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches come from an island off the coast of Africa............they really make a hissing sound.  If you are very quiet in our classroom you can hear them.

Today, Ms. P. from the Burlington School Dept. Science center arrived with various animals for us to explore and learn about.  Our new visitors are a cornsnake named Twitch, Hairy-ette the Rose-Hair tarantula and a group of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.  

The boys and girls were very excited to see and touch the animals.  We discussed their size, nutritional needs, characteristics and natural habitats.  Touching the animals was a highlight..........some are hard, some are squishy, some felt like a fingernail and another was fury looking(but we could not touch!) Be sure to ask your child which animals are cold-blooded, why farmers like cornsnakes, and how many body parts the spider has.  Ask what it means to be nocturnal and what an exo-skeleton is.