EDUCATION : Mall Crawlers : Insects and other creepy critters delight youngsters during science exhibit at shopping center in Puente Hills.

For four days last week, part of the Puente Hills Mall was converted from a shopper’s haven to a teeming habitat featuring chickens, rabbits, snails, plants, insects and excited children.

The mall hosted an exposition of student projects sponsored by the 48th District Agricultural Assn.--a state fair district that encourages awareness of agriculture throughout much of Los Angeles County.

The district offers free classroom materials to promote science and agricultural education in kindergarten through eighth grades, providing youngsters with seeds, egg incubators and materials for other hands-on projects. Exhibits of the results were displayed at the mall along with such attractions as snail races, a NASA space pavilion, African millipedes and hissing cockroaches.

The purpose of the event, said agricultural district spokeswoman Carol Spoelstra, was to instill in children “a basic understanding of where their food and fibers come from. And also an increased interest in science.”

One class from Lone Hill Middle School in San Dimas raised bunnies, lobsters and brine shrimp. Their display offered a recipe for Mono Lake’s alkaline water that calls for salts, baking soda and a pinch of borax and detergent.

Another Lone Hill class experimented with hydroponic agriculture, cultivating pepper plants in water and wrestling with such perplexing themes as, “Will Plants Survive an Algae Attack?”

A class from Lincoln School in Whittier raised chicks and silkworms. And pupils from Palm Elementary School in Hacienda Heights created drawings of food and fiber production in the styles of Manet, Chagall and Warhol.

The NASA exhibit introduced the youngsters to satellite photography and space technology. And there was even a presentation that linked the cosmos to the fair’s rural theme. You guessed it--agriculture in space.

“We’re going to need farmers in space,” said Bob Smith, a spokesman for several aerospace companies that sponsored the exhibit. “In space you simply cannot be running to the grocery store every week.”

But perhaps the fair’s liveliest draws were the creepy-crawly critters.

As Samantha Fernandez, 8, of West Covina coaxed a snail across a leaf along a foot-long wooden pole, toward the finish line, her blue, Slurpie-tainted mouth pouted from the concentration.

“Come on, snail, come on!” cheered her aunt, Deanna Adams.

Fernandez gained second place in that race but refused to touch the prizewinning mollusk. “They look ugly,” she declared.

Andrew Diaz of Pico Rivera showed no such qualms as he handled a hissing cockroach and an African millipede, with its thousand prickly feet.

“It just tickled,” he said.

The exhibit, sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Department of Pesticide Regulation, was designed to introduce schoolchildren to the role that insects play in agriculture and ecosystems, said Lyndon Hawkins, an entomologist with the agency.