We are sharing the reptile love today!

I have posted about this before, but I am a homeschooling mom of 4 kids, and having our reptile pets has been so cool for science and learning. Often we have had a family request to come over to see the reptiles; even before we had snakes, we had people coming to see Puff our bearded dragon! Now that we have quite the collection, I am starting to get more excited about sharing our reptile interest with other interested people. I'm no expert, but I know how to research and point people in the right direction if I need to! I have had the privilege of attending education herp shows and then later speaking with the presenters and keeping in contact with them, so they have been a good resource for me.

My kids are all into reptiles. My son especially loves lizards, so he has the leopard gecko and crested gecko. Puff the beardie is a family pet and is 4 years old. We love books, so I have had fun researching and collecting reptile-themed books. We have a few on our Nook, but I attached a picture with the ones I had just sitting in the school room. There are a few other cool snake stories, like Crictor which is in our 20th Century Children's Book Treasury.

I work part-time at a non-profit vet clinic, and I have been asked to bring my reptiles to various outreaches. My boss always told me, you need a BIG snake for these type of things! I joked about it a few times with my husband and what do you know, he says to get the Colombian boa on CL because she'd be perfect. I always planned to do this later, after my little babies were bigger and also after I had more experience and knowledge - but people ask so we are happy to share what we do have and know.

Today a group of homeschoolers are coming over to our new house to see our collection. And then next week I am bringing a select group to a small Cub Scouts meeting to talk about what it is like to own reptiles as pets. Wish us luck! And if you want, feel free to list some of your most common questions you hear about your pets. I'm thinking of, "Is it poisonous?" "Does it bite?" etc. If you do things like this, please share a little about it; it's inspirational! I really enjoy seeing their faces when they get to interact with a lizard or snake, even our smallish ones. It brings me back to childhood! And now my kids get to experience it but even more, because they want to share about their personal pets.

BIG THANKS to Allidraggy/Donna for posting that Remarkable Reptiles ebook link from Scholastic in another thread. I bought it for $1, and it was well worth it. I printed it and put it in a binder.

Hopefully I will have another parent taking pictures so I can post some later!

Wonderful! We're doing a Save the Frogs! event for homeschoolers next month here-so far, we have 25 kids age 4-14 coming to a local park to learn about frogs and amphibian conservation, do life cycle and dissection alternative activities, and hopefully do some herping (that park usually has frogs and turtles, and we've seen a couple of water snakes there, too). It's a lot of fun. Dr. Kriger at Save the Frogs! does a lot of webinars and is really, really receptive to herp-loving kids.

One thing I'm noticing-I think some of the summer camps/VBS themes this summer have reptile or amphibian characters. I've seen geckos and rattlesnake crafts at Hobby Lobby, and Axolotls and Frilled dragons at Family Christian books, so I'm hoping I'll be able to stock up on cheap herp-themed stuff for next year. I got a bunch of chameleon-themed items really, really cheaply last fall. Oriental trading usually has cheap reptile/amphibian crafts and novelties, too.

I will have to keep my eyes open for reptile/amphibian crafts. I gave coloring sheets to the kids today; snakes with info on the page as well. The kids seemed to enjoy that they were taking something home.

I don't know how well I did, it seemed fine! I showed too many animals though, which won't be a problem when I take animals to another place. It was too easy to share all of my animals since we live here.