By Wendy McDonnell

Slugs. When I was a child, my mom paid me a penny for each slug I found and poured salt on.  I remember watching them shrivel into tiny balls, waste away and die.  It was a form of torture for slugs that I really didn’t question.  After all, what use could they really be?

After a rainstorm the other day, my four year old and I took a walk in the local park.  He started noticing the different slugs creeping out of their hiding places and was mesmerized.  He then shouted, “Let’s go on a slug hunt!”  I grabbed the teachable moment and ran with it.  Soon we started counting the slugs and comparing their shapes, sizes and colours.  Next, we played the Slug Glue Game.  We gently touched the slug’s “foot” and then tried to pick up debris along the trail.  I explained how the glue is like his waterslide, and without it, he would not be able to move.  In a few years, I will tell him that this glue has a natural anaesthetic that First Nations used for toothaches, and that in rural Italy, certain garden slugs are eaten to relieve digestive upset!

As we progressed along the trail, he turned into a slug detective.  I showed him the clues that would lead us to slugs (the slimy trails and the eaten leaves) and then examined the miracles of slugs: How they move with no legs; how they can completely hide their heads (we tried ourselves but could not do it); how they manage to find tasty, rotten debris with only two sensory and two optical tentacles; and how they turn our garbage into a delicious treat that helps our healthy vegetables and fruit grow!

I then embraced Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s theory that children are naturally inclined to be kind, and as parents, it is our job to nurture this in our children.   So, I helped my son save the slugs on the path by tossing them gently into the foliage.  When he revealed slugs in our garden at home, I explained that although we love to share our vegetables with the slugs, we would rather have them help speed up our composting by eating the garden waste we don’t need anymore.  He was thrilled to be able to complete a random act of kindness for his new friends, and gently handpicked some of the slugs from the garden and put them into our compost bin.  At his age, I wanted to encourage his innate compassion, so I didn’t mention that adults often kill slugs in their gardens and their non-organic crops with a toxic pesticide called Metaldehyde.  Nor did I inform him that it is fatal to his poor slugs, and also affects the frogs and birds that eat them, and anything else that comes into contact with it (including pets and children).

We finished the afternoon with the book, “Some Smug Slug” by Pamela Duncan Edwards.  We made “s” slugs out of playdough and created our own rhymes about slippery, slimy slugs.  The day was a far cry from my younger years, but we did end the afternoon slurping a very humane Banana Slug drink…Yum!

Banana Slug Milkshake (NO SALT!)

Ingredients to use:

1 organic banana
½ cup organic milk or cream
1 tsp fresh organic lemon juice
Directions: Blend banana and milk in a blender (try to leave some slimy chunks).  Add lemon juice.  Pour into glass and top with organic fair trade chocolate chips.  It’s like eating a Banana Slug. Squishy, crunchy!

See this article in the November issue of the Council of Parent Participation Preschools Newsletter!

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Articles by Wendy