Getting students to do hands-on activities like terrarium making is invigorating for this old man, especially since I get to bring home a terrarium myself. Being the dedicated teacher that I am, I made space for my creative juices to gel, enabling me to make this poster that covers concepts of the water cycle and photosynthesis.

A task in the son’s “I’m a Young Zoologist” project requires us (because let’s get real, I’m the one who does most of the work) to research on snail-related experiments. What a coincidence! I can just adapt this poster and use it to get the boy to type a response. No need to milk time out to do research.

Put some plants inside a terrarium under sunlight. Then add in a snail. The snail can live as it eats plants and breathes oxygen given out by the plants. The wet soil provides water for the snail.

After I fervently told the boy my plan, he asked me to Google whether snails in Singapore are poisonous. That’s how I learnt that most land snails in Singapore aren’t, but some marine snails are venomous.

I like how one morsel of knowledge paves the way for other knowledge tidbits to gather in the mind. It’s analogous to crystal growing.