Eastern Box Turtle & Garden fun in Discovery

These two weeks of October brought us a new, LIVE friend to our classroom:  a real, live Eastern Box Turtle!! Miss Sue, from the Transitional Kindergarten class, found a beautiful turtle in her backyard and let us 'borrow' him for a week!  The next week, we carefully placed him back in the same area, after feeding him well!

We discussed that Eastern Box turtles are fairly common in North Carolina (did you know it's the official state reptile?!!  Me either!) and are named for their ability to completely box up inside their shells for protection - and every single shell is unique, just like us!

 
Some can live up to 100 years (!!) and can stay in the same 2-4 acre area their whole life if they have all they need! (Which is why it was so important for us to return him to his home.)  We learned our friend was a male because he had RED eyes.  (Females have brown-yellow eyes.)

 
We learned that our turtle liked to sit in a shallow pool of water and relax.  We also learned he liked to burrow under leaves and pine needles, so we gave him plenty of soil, rocks, and natural materials to hide in!

 
We fed him plenty of earthworms, leaves, fruit, vegetables, mushrooms, and crunchy grubs.  This was the highlight of our lesson - watching him (and listening to him) eat! 

We also discussed the importance of a turtle's shell (keeping them safe from predators), that they are reptiles (and not warm-blooded like we are), and that he will hibernate (or bromate) in the winter!  In fact, soon after we returned him to the wild, he likely started preparing himself for hibernation.

The kids LOVED having the turtle in the classroom!  He won us over!  We were proud of ourselves for not touching him (Miss Marion used gloves when cleaning his 'home'), not tapping on his glass house, for speaking in calm voices around him, for feeding him so well, and for returning him to his wild home, where he belongs.  The kids were great with him.  They loved Mr. Turtle's visit so much.

Note:  The 2's and Toddler classes also got to see our turtle, but Miss Marion was so engaged in the lesson for our youngest explorers that she did not take pictures in those classes. :)  They got to hold their very old (pretend) turtles and learned about both sea and land turtles and even pretended to be turtles and curled up inside their own (paper) shell!

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