Giving a Presentation Tomorrow, any Tips?

[Drew S]

I was asked by a friend at work if I would stop by the school he volunteers at tomorrow and give a half hour presentation with some reptiles to around 20 kids.

It sounded like it could be fun. The only thing is, it has now turned into an hour long presentation...to 60 children and 40 adults. I'm planning on bringing the following:

Snakes:

Brazilian Rainbow Boa
Hogg Island Boa
Ball Pythons
California Kingsnakes

Lizards:

Frilled Dragons
Bearded Dragons
Veiled Chameleons
Panther Chameleons
Leopard Geckos
Satanic Leaftail Geckos

Turtles:

A couple huge red-eared sliders
Red Foot Tortoise

And maybe some hermit crabs.

I'm leaving all of my particularly agressive snakes at home, just incase.

I'm just going to give some facts about each species, where they're from, what they eat, how big they get etc.

Just wondering if anybody had any pointers for me? I've never done anything like this before to anyone outside of a few friends. hehe.

Thanks,

- Drew

[Linds]

The key factor in giving a presentation is to keep the audience's attention. The best way I have found is by keeping the presentation very interactive. The basic guideline I use is as follows (for each animal)...

-give the name of the animal (ie- Marvin the Ball Python)
-ask if anyone knows what kind of habitat it is naturally from (ie forest or the desert)
-ask what they think it might eat
-tell of any unique characteristics that animal may have
-explain the what differs one animal from another similar type (such as kingsnakes from boas from pythons)
-you can also go in to their status in the wild or the differences in captive care vs. wild
-follow each animal with a question & answer period

All of the above points are easy to elaborate on, you can make them as brief or detailed as your time permits. With the amount of animals you have you will likely have to be quite brief with each one. Our one hour shows at work usually only have ten animals. Good luck, and remember the key point is to keep their focus ;)

[Drew S]

Thanks for the tips Linds, I appreciate it. Do you think I should limit the animals I bring? I'm not getting paid or anything, so I'm not too worried about finishing early or late. I guess I could bring a few 'maybes', and only bring them out if I have enough time.

[Lrptls]

i'v never done any big presentations, just for things at my school with my snakes or people that come to my house and dont know squat about reptiles. but i notice people get really into when they can touch some of them. i remember when i was little and people did presentations, the best part was geting to touch them. ofcourse if you want to do that use something that definetly wont bite and make sure people wash their hands =)

[SaIiLdVaEnR]

If there is any time left over you could ask some of the kids/adults if they wanted to hold one. Only one that is very calm and easily handled though, of course. I'm not sure if that would be out of the question or not but I'm sure it would be memorable for the kids :D. Have a great time and my best of luck goes out to you!

Aidan

[Dom]

Ive done about 3 thousand presentations now varying from 10 kids to 2000 adults..

Best tip I can tell u is Have fun .. don't worry about the crowd and just have fun and go with your passions for the animals..

It will go well!

[Jeff Hathaway]

Take fewer animals! 'Maybes' are useful, but I'd leave out one of the boas, one of the chameleons, and only take one slider. I'd allow supervised touching/handling of the snakes if you're comfortable with it. Not the lizards or turtles, though.

I'd differ from Linds in that I like to have questions all at the end, so that you don't have to constantly regain control of the group, and less time is wasted. It works better for us that way.

Include some general info- what do reptiles do for the winter, what makes snakes different from lizards, etc.

Good luck,

Jeff Hathaway
Sciensational Sssnakes!!

[Drew S]

I'm a little worried allowing one of the children to handle a snake. Maybe an adult, and if I did, it would likely be my female ball python. They said that if it all goes well, they would love to have me back for paying jobs during the summer.

My plan is to start with the lizards. Give a brief history, and then start small with a leopard gecko, and work my way up to the frilled dragon. Then the turtles, and I'll likely do what you said Jeff, and just bring the one largest turtle, and the red foot. Then, I'll end off with the snakes, at which point I can invite somebody to the front to handle the ball, with my supervision of course.

With each animal I'll state it's natural range, size, food, diurnal/nocturnal etc., and any interesting characteristics that I can think of at the time.

I was wondering, is it best to take out the lizard, do a quick demonstration, such as getting my frilly to frill his neck, and then put him away, or should I keep him out until I move on to the next animal? I'm just affraid one of them is going to try and take off, and I'll waste my time trying to catch them, hehe.

Thanks for all the tips guys, you've eased my nerves :D

Also, how do you handle the inevitable question (remember, these are ages 6-12), of how snakes "do it".

[nikkin]

If you let the children touch one of the animals, they wont forget it. When I was in Kindergarden, (I am 21 now) I still remember when Grant from PCPC came to my school and did a presentation like this.

[Linds]

I would bring the animal count down. Another very important thing when alllowing children to touch animals, it is a very good idea to have them wash their hands before the presentation, and then during the presentation stress to them that they need to keep their hands off their faces until you give them a good dosing of an antibacterial agent at the end. I've got experience giving shows to groups ranging anywhere from 3 - adult. Sometimes with the really young kids (3) they may grab and squeeze so you may want to skip those ones or pet the snake with their hand for them. Snakes are usually fine as long as you keep control of their heads so they cannot snip at anyone if they smelled something yummy or whatnot. What we usually say for snakes is jsut to pet with their fingers gently in one direction on the snake at its mid-body point, and for lizards just to pet on its back lightly with two fingers, tortoises to pet on the shell or leg. We never let people pet turtles or amphibians.

As for the "how the snakes do it" question, in the gazillion kids I've done presentations for, I can't recall any of them asking that question. Usually the only sexually related questions are how do you tell if it is male or female, how the babies are born, how many babies, stuff like that. Another popluar question for snakes is how they go to the bathroom. Just answer the questions in easy enough terms for them to understand ;)

Jeff,
Just curious why you say not to handle lizards, only the snakes? We've always allowed handling on all herps that was safe to do so...

[LadyHawke]

when letting them see animals that they are not going to hold its best to point the head in the opposite direction, even if you know the animal, one bite can cause a lawsuit. to do any mall or school or public show i have to have insurance.....i am insured for a million

[Drew S]

Well, it went pretty good today :D

Here are some pics:

http://reptiles.screamingmute.com/img/gallery/kidscience3.jpg


http://reptiles.screamingmute.com/img/gallery/kidscience6.jpg


http://reptiles.screamingmute.com/img/gallery/kidscience7.jpg


http://reptiles.screamingmute.com/img/gallery/kidscience12.jpg

http://reptiles.screamingmute.com/img/gallery/kidscience14.jpg

[Jeff Hathaway]

Great pics, Drew; glad to hear it went well.

Linds, in small groups that are well behaved, I'll let them touch and/or hold certain lizards. Ones that we use for these purposes are blue tongued skinks, bearded dragons, leopard and fat tailed geckos. I find most lizards are more easily stressed than snakes, perhaps due to their external ears and enthusiastic noisy kids! Also, lizards tend to fall into two categories- small flightly things that are too likely to escape or be injured, and larger things that have claws that can scratch, even if they're just trying to climb. Further, lizards may carry salmonella bacteria under their claws, and since in most venues it is impossible to police handwashing, we don't like to chance it.

Turtles, obviously, have the latter two problems (salmonella not just under the claws, though!), plus we find them very likely to bite fingers (feeding, not defensive).

Snakes, on the other hand, are generally cleaner than people. Assuming they're not covered in fecal material, the salmonella risk is very low. Coupled with the overall reliability of many species in terms of likelihood of bites, and severity of any bites that might occur, snakes are vastly superior in terms of 'hands on'. Now we do allow more hands on than any other program I'm aware of. When we're at a school class, we may have anywhere from 6-14 snakes out simultaneously, all being held by the kids. We usually have one larger specimen, a burm or boa, that is closely supervised by one of us, and the other presenter supervises the rest. Generally, we're more concerned about injury to the snakes than to the kids. What can a corn snake (or any other small to medium sized non-venomous colubrid) really do to harm a child?

We recommend hand washing, but cannot enforce it. How would we do so at a shopping mall, or a provincial park ampitheatre with 600 people and no washrooms nearby?

In 10 years of doing this, we've had one injured snake (a garter, which died about a year after having its back broken from a squeeze), and two kids bitten (one from a corn, one from a milk), neither of which even required a bandaid. One of the bites was completely indiscernible- I'm only taking the mother's word that she 'saw' the child get bitten, but frankly I've got my doubts.

For the extreme benefit the participants get from actually handling the snakes, we feel that these are acceptable risks to take. Of course, insurance is a good thing:-)

As for the questions, certainly we get all the ones you mentioned, but we do find that we get the 'do snakes have sex?' question quite frequently, especially from grade 6-12. The answer is always yes, but the details one describes vary quite a bit with the age! We had a good laugh with this one at a recent program for Canadian Wildlife Federation instructors.

Jeff Hathaway
Sciensational Sssnakes!!

[Frillie]

hey. YOU ARE PLANNING ON TAKING TOO MANY ANIMALS!!! i work at a reptile education centre and we do this type of thing everyday. If the kids are young i.e. <8 we use like 6 reptiles. Becuase you're planning on taking smaller animals though maybe 7 or 8. If they are a little older i.e. >8 we use like 5. Same thing though because yours are smaller i would recommmend like 6 or 7. Keep in mind people dont wanna look at small things you have 100 people....if they're sitting in the back row a leaf tailed gecko is gonna look like nothing. I would take like 3 snakes....prefferably 2 boids and a colubrid for diversity; 2 lizards...i'd say the beardie and the frilled for overall size and the tortoise. Think about it....thats 10 minutes an animal. You should cover adult size, diet, region of origin, interesting characteristics, ie the king can eat rattlesnakes..the kids will love it... (stupid kids.... :) ) and then take questions for a couple minutes...thats very important. Agin if they are yuonger take 1 more animal cuz they have no attention span and will get bored faster so less time per animal...and save the ebst for last....

Good luck!

peace

[Frillie]

LOL *** !!!

i probably should have read some of the latter replies...or even the date you posted that eh.....

What a ******...any way congrats....see ya

peace

[BoidKeeper]

I'm a school teacher and I do reptile shows all the time.
My tips are if you have something important to say don't say it with a herp in your hand because they will not hear a word you say. Also don't be affraid to say "I don't know the answer to that." Don't feel like you have to answer everything they ask. They will stump you so just be honest with them. Bad info is worth than no info.
Cheers,
Trevor