Piggyback to classroom visitor

[Keltikmom]

Got me thinking….What’s the worst creature that visited your classroom?
And Lisa53, the superintendent doesn’t count.

I taught in a school that backed up to some mountains. We would see deer, raccoons, rabbits, and occasional coyote. My next door neighbor found a snake in one of her drawers. Snakes were common.

But, have you ever seen a Sarasota spider? They are the size of a saucer and jump. I was doing our morning meeting and looked over to see one crawling on the baseboard…right next to the children. I made them all go back to their seats, which of course all they wanted to do was see the spider.

Then I girled out….I ran two doors down to get my male teacher friend to remove it. He still teases me about it.

 

[kahluablast]

We also are rural and in a forest. We have had snakes and mice.

One day I opened my closet door to get something. Moved a box and a giant spider jumped out. I HATE spiders and am terrified of them. I also did not want my 3rd graders to freak out, so I tried to stay calm. I knew there was no way I could do anything with this spider, so I had a student go push my call button while I kept an eye on it, and did an urgent request for someone to come geared to remove a spider from my room. Boy was the custodian surprised to find a spider bigger than his hand sitting there in my closet.

Another time a small mouse crawled out from behind a bookcase during math. It just sat there so I told the kids it must be very interested in the math lesson. I called for someone to come get it while I tailored the rest of my lesson toward mousie purposes. Funnest lesson I did!

 

[amiga13]

Fun question!

When I taught in Los Angeles (definitely not rural):
*A bird flew into the classroom and kept flying as it looked for a way out. I took my 1st graders outside and the young female AP shooed it out with a broom.
*Do cockroaches count? We had tons of monster-sized cockroaches. I learned to stomp loudly on the old wood floors before I opened cupboards.

 

[WordFountain]

Another time a small mouse crawled out from behind a bookcase during math. It just sat there so I told the kids it must be very interested in the math lesson. I called for someone to come get it while I tailored the rest of my lesson toward mousie purposes.

Kahluablast: I wonder if we had the same mouse come visit. Mine came during our Math lesson too

The worst visitors we had were frequent fliers . Camel Cricket. They’re awful. They look like 1/2 spider & 1/2 cricket and man can they.JUMP.
I’m attaching a pic in a separate reply. You’ve been warned lol

 

[WordFountain]

Warning: Pic of Camel Cricket

Camel Cricket

 

[lisa53]

Well, since you asked...

You know I was a Peace Corps Volunteer at the beginning of my teaching career in Ghana...

I killed a green mamba in my classroom. He was discovered by a student under the lab counters, shedding his skin. Naturally, this happened during a test! So 36 silent, studious girls suddenly became 36 girls standing on their desks screaming. I beat the snake to death with a meter stick.

(No big deal...just a little green snake. They are known to be aggressive, able to climb trees, and to have a deadly venom. We were probably saved by the fact that he was busy shedding his skin).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_green_mamba

 

[tia]

so exciting! i've only had the random bee or fly and then those awful tiny millipede worms that would sneak it and then die all curled up at the baseboards--that was our old school--thankfully haven't seen any of those since we rebuilt.

but here's a story: our last principal would bring his little dog (maltese?) every once in a while--Larry--freaking hairy rat Larry..... brought him down to my room before school--dog wandered around--went under my desk--trotted out, P started to leave and my Super Sensitive Sniffer alerted me to a smell. i started sniffing around.. sniff, sniff...."your dog pooped in here" "no, Larry doesn't do that." sniff, sniff.... "Yah, he does---under my desk!" P was mortified and cleaned it up and then i sprayed room smelly stuff. and it continues to be a joke between us over 10 years later. (the incident has a spot in one of my Kahoots....i think next year's class was the last group that will have had that P--as kindies....so i'll have to change the wording)

 

[eliza4one]

Visitors to my classroom

Birds, mice, and a lizard.

 

[Sam5]

Definitely mice, wasps, and lots of cockroaches. But the worse was I taught in a really old building and there were bats in the attic. Every once in awhile one would decide to go flying through the building. One teacher who was really into science kept a net in his room to capture them and release them outside. One time we had to hold all of the parents outside open house for ten minutes while we captured a bat!

 

[Shelby3]

One year

our school was infested with mice. They were everywhere. Custodians refused to do anything. I bought a cheapie 10 pack of snap traps and caught 5 in 7 days. I set them before I left school and did away with them in the morning.

I really wanted to leave one on the P's desk.

 

[Keltikmom]

Classroom visitors

Wow!! Good stories!

I couldn’t have handled the roaches. I remember quite a while back, someone posted about opening a cupboard and it was black and crawling with roaches.

My screams would have been heard in space. And I’ve lived with them.

 

[T.A.R.D.I.S]

We had a scorpion in the building last year. Other than that, the usuals: bees, wasps, and spiders.

 

[rusty]

We used to get an occasional snake....and our head custodian, a big, burly 6ft3in guy was terrified of them. The science teacher who was a 5 ft tall older woman loved snakes and would gladly come and rescue the visitor.

 

[Ima Teacher]

We had several snakes, lots of mice, and and an occasional hamster that tried to make a break for it.

We are across the street from the landfill, so we get buzzards. We also have deer.

 

[eagles23]

Mice, a huge spider, and tons of ants inside the classroom. The most disruptive thing (other than bees/wasps) was actually outside my classroom. I was teaching and saw a girl's eyes begin to bug as she looked at the window. By the look on her face, I wouldn't have been surprised to look out and see zombies, but it was two precious fawns. They were just strolling down the driveway and nibbling on the grass in front of our windows. You can imagine the crush to get to the windows for a better view. They visited the school for three days in a row and I had a bad suspicion that maybe their momma had been hit by a car.

 

[booklady57]

Years ago

I taught in a classroom that had an entrance outside the main school building. There was an immense alligator snapping turtle just outside my door, well over two feet in diameter. You might think oh, a turtle, that doesn't seem too bad. But these guys look like armored dinosaurs, with barbs on their tails. They can definitely do some damage. The principal called animal control, but they wouldn't do anything. A parent was there for a conference. He grabbed the turtle by the tail and hurled him into the back of his pickup truck. I think he became dinner.

At another school I worked at we had regular wildlife visits on the playgrounds and fields around the building:alligators, wild boar, turkeys, sandhill cranes, etc. As far as I know, none of them ever made it into the building.

 

[Izzy23]

At my old school, we backed up to a nature reserve, so we got lots of visitors to the playground. Nothing ever made it inside, beyond the usual bees and spiders. But we had a mating pair of sandhill cranes who lived on our playground and had a baby every year. The problem is, you should NOT get near a sandhill when it has a baby -- which one of our first graders found out the hard way. Trip to the hospital with a puncture wound.

 

[Ruby tunes]

Classroom visitors

A gopher snake, rattlesnake, gopher snake, several mice, and black widow spiders. I quickly learned never to put my hands anywhere I couldn’t see. In SoCal most classrooms open directly to the outside. My school was located next to some open fields in an agricultural area.

I’m sure the snakes got in when the night custodian would prop open the door with his cleaning cart while cleaning inside my room. The mice invaded when there was some new construction on campus. Security guards removed each snake. I trapped a few mice myself. I kept a handy flyswatter for spiders and flies during warmer weather.

 

[Ima Spedtcher]

A HUGE centipede- at least a foot long!

I know I would step in front of a shooter to save a kid- but centipedes? I would be standing on the desks!

So I was lucky that there were no students in the room. We were having a grade level meeting and one of the teachers calmly stood up, grabbed my scissors, and cut the thing in half. She is my hero

 

[SassyTeach]

Hmmm...

Birds, bugs, and such, but I think the coolest thing I had was a bearded dragon. We found it in my room in like April or May...towards the end of the year. The funniest thing is that one of the first grade rooms on the opposite side of the building had their bearded dragon escape early in the year. Somehow it had been living in the building and never seen until we saw it in my room all those months later!

 

[Haley23]

We still laugh about the time in our old building (which was falling apart/probably didn't meet safety regulations) where my teammate messaged me and said, "Don't come out of your room, there are bats in the hallway," and I just said, "Okay." The fact that it didn't really surprise me at all .

Thankfully I have yet to actually see anything really gross actually in my room. In the same old building, when I started I was organizing my books (back in the days of guided reading/leveled readers) and putting them in plastic bags. I left some of the book bags out on my desk. When I returned the next day, they had holes in them . Thankfully I never actually laid eyes on the creature who did that, because I would probably have a panic attack.

 

[Teach 5]

Critters

Mice and spiders for sure. A bat was a strange one.

 

[grade2rocks]

So many mice. Old building, so a major problem every fall, especially after we started eating breakfast in the classrooms.

When it got to a certain level that the custodians couldn't keep up, the district would send exterminators.

 

[PPCDTeacher]

An old school I taught in had rats regularly found in rooms. There were large open rectangles in the brick walls along the hallway side, so rats just ran up and down visiting rooms for years.

 

[choppie70]

We get neighborhood dogs once a year or so.

The year I had a room with a door that goes out of the building we had a wild turkey peek in.