TSBVI Animal Care – Snakes

by Kathi Garza and Mary Abraham

I love connecting with other parts of campus when I can, and lately, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about one area of career education at TSBVI by Mary Abraham, our Animal Care Job Coach. Animal Care is home to guinea pigs, rabbits, snakes, fish, and a bearded dragon. This year, Mary is focusing on tightening up some of the routines she has her students working on, and when she approached me about helping out with this task, I was eager to get started. Our first mission was to work out a routine for caring for the two snakes that live in Animal Care. Slinky is a butter albino corn snake, and Snoi is a tessera corn snake. 

Goals

• Work independently on weekly habitat maintenance.
• Document feeding of each snake.
• Verify temperature and cleanliness of the environment.
• Anticipate tasks that need to be completed weekly (ex: food preparation).
• Practice literacy skills in the appropriate literacy media.
• Choose appropriate tools for documenting progress.
• Use optical devices or other tools to access information about the habitat.

Procedure

1. Task analyze the routine you want students to work on when caring for the pets in their lives.
2. Organize animal care materials in predictable locations.
3. Ensure that materials like thermometers and instructions are accessible to the particular student. 
4. Create a chart to encourage independence and accountability for students. The Snake Care Chart that Mary and I created might give you some ideas for how to structure your own chart.
5. Scaffold support for each student until you are able to release the entire task to them.

Extension Ideas

• Assign students to complete a research project about snakes.
• Read and/or write fiction stories about snakes.
• Visit an aquarium or zoo where you can touch snakes.
• Plan a bus trip to the pet store to purchase food for your snakes.
• Research the cost of owning and caring for a snake.

Note

We understand that not all campuses or classrooms present the opportunity to care for pets in this way, but we felt that this process is important to share with our community. For home, school, and workplace tasks, task analyzing and using charts or checklists can be very helpful for our students. Many may be able to translate an activity like this into their home environment where they may have pets of their own.