At first glance, you probably won't know how the following three items go together.
These three items did come together nicely, however, for a fun lesson.
Odzala is a national park in the Republic of the Congo. The video we watched centered on a water hole within Odzala, which they call a bai. I had purchased Graeme Base's The Water Hole at the same time I purchased his other books and had been saving it for this unit. With the video using the word bai repeatedly, I wondered if that's where the name for the "new" Bai drinks came from. We'd never had Bai drinks before, so I purchased some to sample as a nice Eat Your Homework addition.
It turns out that bai is the Mandarin Chinese word for "pure" and it's also an acronym for botanical antioxidant infusions. That's what Bai, the company, has to say about it. The drinks are an interesting thing to learn about in and of themselves, and they fit right in with our ecology unit because a main ingredient of Bai drinks is coffeefruit--the part of the plant normally tossed as waste after coffee beans are taken out of the middle of the fruit.
Anyway, this is how things went: We watched the video and talked about our thoughts and reactions (because there are some unexpected things you learn relating to some animal's behavior). A couple of days later we reviewed some things, including the word bai. The bai in Odzala is of course a very important source of nourishment for the animals there, and not just because they need water but because of what is growing in and around that water for food. I pulled out the Bai drinks I'd purchased and told them about my word association and what I'd learned about the drinks. Then, while sipping our nourishing, refreshing Bai drinks, I read aloud The Water Hole.
The Water Hole is, first and foremost, a visually delicious picture book. Base is a wonderful artist and a genius with clues, mysteries, and hidden pictures. The Water Hole is also a counting book, but we of course didn't need to use it for that. I used the book as a little test. We were nearing the end of our unit and in the background of each two-page spread is a geographical clue. My test for the kids was to see if they could name the biome and the location on the planet that each of these pictures represented. It was a fun little activity and they passed with flying colors. (They later examined the book individually, looking for the hidden animals.)
This segued into my assigning them their final project for the unit. Each was to choose a country--any country--and create a PowerPoint on that country from an ecological view. What biome(s) make up that country? What makes up the wildlife? How does it affect agriculture, industry, economy? What are people's lives like as a result? I required a minimum of 10 slides. Later, after each did the research and made their slide shows, they presented them to the family.
