We are malacologists!

This week the Early Years children became malacologists!

We set up an snail observation station with magnifying glasses and observation sheets.

In our Science lesson, we learnt how the important role of a malacologist is to ‘classify’ the snails into different groups.

We found out that there are lots of different ways in which snails can be classified by looking at their similarities and differences.

After lots of observations we sorted the snails into different groups such as by colour, shape, size, habitat and what they eat.

We discovered that snails move much more quickly than we previously thought! Some of them almost managed to escape!

After we finished observing the snails we released them back to the swale. We were sad to see them go but will look out for the different types of snails next time we are on a mini beast hunt!