I am sure I have mentioned a few hundred times how terrified I am of snakes – truly am.  Grew up in an area where we had snakes in our garden and I hated them (and I mean HATE) but both my kids are fascinated by snakes and as I have discovered there is nothing better than finding a topic that you kids love and letting them sink in and learn as much as they want about it.  So we have been doing that.  We have been watching documentaries about snakes and a snake catcher from Durban (my son sits and holds my hand so that I don’t get scared so it is totally worth it).  We recently spent ages at the Reptile House in the London Zoo and we have been reading everything we can about them (although I will admit we don’t read about snakes as night as it would give me nightmares).

I recently discovered that we had a Snake Life Cycle book on our bookshelf (Life Cycles: Snakelet to Snake).  I had totally forgotten it was there.  I bought a whole set of life cycle books about 3 years ago and we have dipped in and out of them whenever we have covered an animal or plant.

It is not a very detailed book but it is a perfect introduction to snakes and I must admit it was the perfect reading book for my seven-year old – he prefers reading non-fiction books to fiction. The book is 23 pages long and covers the entire life cycle and a bit about hunting and habitats.

My son loved reading it and I actually think I am going to dig out the other life cycle books so we can use them as readers.

I must be honest I have not found a lot of learning activities based on snakes (and I don’t mean cute cartoon snakes my kids want realistic snake activities) so I was impressed when I found a few goodies on the Twinkl Resources website (all part of their Classic package).

They have a set of Dangerous Australian snake fact cards.

To say that these cards have been a hit with my son is such a understatement.  He read extracts from the cards to his grandparents over Skype and he keeps laying them out on tables, ordering them and retelling us the facts about the different snakes.

He desperately wants more of these cards so I am going to have to search and see if I can find something similar for snakes in Africa for him.

We also found a snake themed word search

And A Python comprehension.  Honestly I have never seen my son so happy to sit and do a comprehension EVER. (They do have three versions of the comprehension on their site so you can choose the level which you think is suitable for your kids age).

Oh and we als found this cool activity where the kids can map the location of some snakes.

The Snakelet to Snake Book is one I bought may years ago.  The Twinkl Resources pages are part of their paid for subscriptions.  All links are correct at the time of me writing this post.