As 11-year-old Arbel Ishoo watched Snookie the snake slide and curl his creepy black body around a Lincoln Park Zoo instructor's arm, he scooted his plastic chair backward to safety.
"I'm not very brave, myself," confessed zoo volunteer Sharleen Frank, while cradling the harmless kingsnake. "But if I can hold him, you can touch him. I'm not dead yet."
Frank then strolled around the classroom at Transfiguration Catholic Elementary School on the North Side, giving the 5th-grade students a closeup look at Snookie's hyperactive tongue and letting them pat his back.
By the time it was Arbel's turn, his chair was nearly out the door. But, gathering together his courage, he took a deep breath, stared Snookie in the eye, then touched the snake lightly with his index finger.
"I'm not afraid he'll bite, but when he moves, it gives me a shiver," Arbel said.
The snake was just the first of three creatures--the others were a parrot and a hedgehog--introduced to the class in a Lincoln Park Zoo program called "Zoo-to-You," which brings live animals into Chicago classrooms of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders.
Animal visits to schools started informally more than 25 years ago, when former Zoo Director Lester Fisher would bring selected animals with him on talks. Docents began the program in 1972, and in 1985, it became a structured four-step curriculum. The program now reaches more than 5,000 students and 200 teachers a year and has become more than just an exercise in show-and-tell.
Teachers must attend a 2-hour workshop and then lead the class through two suggested lessons outlined by Zoo-To-You staff. The lessons expose children to new vocabulary words (adaptation, grassland, protection, survival) and environmental issues and animal habitats.
In the third lesson, specially trained docents bring small animals, including ferrets, armadillos and kestrels, from the Children's Zoo into the classrooms.
The same animal never makes the trip two days in a row, and some, like the parrot or the hedgehog, cannot be touched.
"The Zoo-To-You program coincided with a general awareness of the environment in the 1970s," said Patsy Benveniste, the Lincoln Park Zoo's director of programs. "There's a need to educate the kids to be stewards of the environment. They're very idealistic at a young age, and ideas catch fire early. We need to sustain that."
For some children, it may be the only time they will ever touch a snake, hear a parrot squawk or inspect a hedgehog's bristling spines.
Lincoln Park Zoo director Kevin Bell was exposed to animals as a child, because his father was curator of birds and chairman of the Department of Ornithology at the Bronx (N.Y.) Zoo. When Bell was 5 years old, his family moved into a house on the grounds of the zoo, behind the Reptile House.
Bell said the Zoo-to-You program reflects changes in the mission of modern zoos.
"Twenty years ago our primary goal was animal collection, to reproduce them rapidly and release them back in the wild," he said.
"Now, since the wildlife is disappearing and there aren't that many places to take them back to, our mission has shifted slightly. Educating the people about preserving these places and teaching people about the relationship between humans and wildlife is a very important part."
At Transfiguration School, Frank and her partner Carole Lieberman, began the class by talking about animal adaptation and habitat, topics the teacher, Carol Cleland, had covered in lessons one and two. Students described their own environment, using words like cement and metal.
Then the 5th-graders answered questions and talked about the environment of the snake, parrot and hedgehog, as each animal was unveiled and carried around the classroom.
Later, Steven Dilny, 10, observed that the hedgehog looked like a cactus and said he didn't know hedgehogs had spines. Kristine Aguilar, 10, learned that parrots crack nuts.
"I like seeing them up close," said 10-year-old Trisha Molina. "I liked the parrot, because it was so colorful and so cool when you saw his tongue and stuff. And the hedgehog was so cute, like a little baby."