Serpent Time
Third-graders Become Snake Handlers At P.S. 150

By Carl Glassman
POSTED MARCH 1, 2008

"Does anyone know why it’s called a king snake?” Erin Kelley asked as the four-foot creature coiled around her arm before a class of rapt P.S. 150 3rd graders. “They do not wear a crown, they do not live in castles, they do not rule over us.”

Several students were ready with the answer (king snakes feed on even the most poisonous snakes) just as they could talk about the other species she had brought with her: the green tree python (“morelia verdis” as one girl noted), the western hog nose snake, the milk snake and the albino Burmese python.

It’s no wonder Danielle McKee’s 3rd-grade class was so well informed.  They have studied snakes since the beginning of the school year, and are raising a corn snake nearly from its birth. In fact they have done just about every snake thing a class can do: they created snake habitat collages and illustrative water color snake posters, wrote fictional snake stories, made snake scale prints and a clay alphabet formed by snake letters. Then there’s the 30-foot long reticulated cloth python that the kids stuffed with thousands of plastic bags.

But what’s better than holding a real python? (See photo above.) The one that Kelley, of Snakes-n-Scales, an animal education organization, brought to the class was a tyke of 25 pounds that would grow to 300 pounds.

As with all the snakes the kids were allowed to touch, Kelley laid down the rules. Among them “BDB.”  “What that stands for,” she told them to muffled giggles, “is butts don’t bite. Heads bite, butts do not. Do not reach for a head. You are a stranger.”

The children seemed fearless in their eagerness to touch the slithery creatures. Sarah Creighton said the class has made her more comfortable with snakes.

“It wasn’t like I was scared before but it wasn’t like I was right at home holding a snake,” she said. “I’m still a little cautious with the ones with huge teeth.”

Lisa Pinchoff, the student teacher, chose not to touch the snakes, though she insisted she wasn’t afraid.

“I don’t need to touch,” she said, then laughed. “I was looking at them and thinking they’d make nice shoes.”

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