Pets in the Classroom .. Good idea?

I think that having pets in the classroom can truly enhance a child's school life. Most children enjoy animals and find watching them to be interesting and engaging. Animals in the classroom offer teacher real life examples to use during teaching. Of course it is easy to see how they enhance science, but they are useful for writing, math, reading, and other subjects as well. Exposure to animals teaches kids many life lessons as well as academic ones.

I always have fish in my classroom. They are fun to watch and come in so many varieties. Fish have a calming effect on the classroom, from the soothing sound of water to watching them swim around their tank. Other animals are fun to watch also. Our hamster, Fluffy, likes to stuff her cheeks with food and hide it away. Our former hamster, Matilda, used to run on her wheel, much to our enjoyment. Our chinchilla takes the cake when she runs around the classroom during our math lesson. She likes to sniff the kids and run between their desks. I have more than one student that runs to check out the pets first thing in the morning.

Some teachers leave their pets at that level of involvement, I don't. I actually use my animals in lessons for example; compare and contrast two fish. Children carefully observe two fish, draw them, make a Venn diagram, and finally write a paragraph comparing and contrasting the two. Adaptations? Looking at Charlotte the chinchilla and Fluffy the hamster, we discuss the environment these two animals live in and what adaptations they have to help them. Science is easy, but what about reading? As we read Humphrey the hamster stories, the kids make connections to our own hamster. We use the fish tank to talk about fractions (what fraction of the fish are tiger barbs?).

Incidental learning and teaching in the moment is another plus of having pets in the classroom. The students are always noticing something new. Why does the bigger tank have a heater and the gold fish doesn't? Why is the fish tank green and we aren't using the filter? (Because the fish got sick and the carbon in the filter would remove the medicine.) Kids naturally ask question about things around them. (What are those little brown things? Poop ... ewwww)

Academic learning is not the only kids of learning kids do at school. There are a lot of life lessons to learn. The most obvious, and sometimes the most painful, is the lesson of death. Fish can die of no apparent reason. Sometimes something serious happens to the environment and you can have many fish die at one time. Lessons: living things die and changes in the environment effects living things. Kids are often not as attached to fish as they are to other creatures. Hamsters also have a short life span. This year our former hamster Matilda died of old age. Having to explain to children why their pet that they held and cared for is no longer with us can be difficult. Lessons learned: animals can die from old age, how to grieve. For Matilda we had a ceremony and burned letters the kids wanted to "send" to her. We will use the ashes from those letters to plant flowers this spring.

Pets in the classroom can be little more than a decoration or very much apart of the daily doings in a class. It is up to the teacher how much or how little to use the pet in the classroom. We know that it is helpful to students to make connections between what they are learning and what is going on in their own lives. Pets help to make many more connections. Plus, I love to see Charlotte's little face when I get to school in the morning. Oh and my black goldfish "wagging" his tail in greeting. I can't forget Fluffy looking for food either! And then ...