Our New Participant: Limicolaria flammea

The Goderich school where we are holding our Leading Young Writers workshop, Lady Patricia Kabba Memorial JSS, is doing gardening in preparation for the opening of school. With the hoe flying dangerously, this very determined being speedily took a supple beeline for our workshop. Here you see Limicolaria flammea about to climb our steps.

We spent the day talking about teaching writing not in our clubs, but in our classrooms. We discussed what the 2011 junior secondary language arts syllabus requires in terms of writing, and then divided into groups to plan how we would get a class writing the genre of our choice, and presenting it to the class. The participants found these practicals helpful, and we'll continue tomorrow. We also all enjoyed writing Tanka poems, and found them much more personal than the Haiku we had done earlier in the week. One of the teachers wrote a four-tanka poem about the death of his grandmother!

When I got home, I saw another snail outside my kitchen window. I've just been out there and took photos of more than two dozen Limicolaria flammea in my garden! What's going on? Although this snail is native to West Africa, has anybody done a study on its having become an invasive species on its home turf?