School wildlife show

Entertaining and educating school aged children at the same time is never easy. However sometimes it pays to outsource some of the teaching or lessons to an outside expert. One such area is wildllife education. In years gone by, most school teachers would send a load of year seven kids off to the local Zoo in Melbourne for their classification unit of science. The kids would see lots of different animals in cages and then come back to class and classify them. The downside of all this is that most kids have been to the zoo before and seen the animals and so are relatively disinterested when taken to the zoo by their school. A second downside is that the students actually spend very little time actually looking at the animals. By the time they get taken to the zoo from the school in a bus and then the same in terms of getting back to school, there is very little time left to actually look at the animals. This available time drops off sharply when you factor in such essentials as toilet breaks for the kids and lunch time where the kids can sit around and eat. Then of course you have to factor in more downtime when the kids are educated in some sort of way by a zoo staff member in the education centre buildings or somewhere else in the grounds. In all it is a lot of stuffing around for very little worthwhile gain. With government-run zoos now giving free admission on weekends and yet charging the kids for excursions on weekdays, it makes more sense for kids to go to the zoo in their own time. By contrast school wildlife incursions remove all the logistical headaches of getting kids to the venue and allow more time for face-to-face education with the animals and the animal handler teacher. In common with the zoo excursion most school wildlife show incursions are largely show and tell and any interaction tends to be between the presenter and the kids, rather than the animal and the kids. You cannot for example let 20 kids each hold a parrot at the same time and expect them all to come back to the handler in one piece! Of course you can do this with reptiles such as snakes, lizards and crocodiles. It is for this reason that the snake man uses reptiles in his animal shows and wildlife incursions as these animals alone are suited to hands-on wildlife education. While there are several companies now marketing school reptile shows in Melbourne and other parts of Victoria and Australia, only the snake man and his staff do hands on reptile shows, where they let the kids handle the animals. It is for that reason they are known as Australia's best reptiles and frankly there is no better education about wildlife endangered animals and the like available to primary and secondary school students anywhere in Australia. Better yet, the cost per student is condierably less than what is seen in zoo excursions or any other kind of school excursion. The only thing to note is that because the snake man is so busy, demand for his shows is huge and bookings should be made well in advance of the planned incursion date. Because the snake man is a world recognized reptile expert and having authored numerous books and scientific papers, all of which are readily available, the wildlife experience can be continued well after the reptile incursion has been and gone.