Our homeschooling will take an interesting turn starting today: Survivor, the show has started. Unfortunately, we were all busy tonight and did not see the whole show, but even in the few minutes we had the show on, a fun fact came up. DS said, “Oh, I’m glad I’m not there right now.” They were showing one of the contestants sitting on the edge of the water with a hippo nearby. DS knows that interestingly hippos are very dangerous and have been recorded as killing humans. He also knows from one our visits at a zoo that Hippos projectile poop and spread it even farther by flipping their tail (there are various YouTube videos to show this phenomena if you are interested – you can’t quite get the full effect because you miss the beautiful scent, but I’m sure you can imagine.).
This will be just the beginning of our exploration. We will have to find Gabon in Africa and research the culture, habitat, animals, etc. Maybe we’ll have to create a little study guide for the season. I’m sure DD would volunteer for that job.
You could always start with some geography games placing African nations in there right locations on Sheppard Software.
You could listen to music from Gabon.
You can color in the Gabon flag.
Perhaps you could even have the kids pretend that you are going to travel to Gabon and ask them to find out about currency, language, weather, etc.
I did not get an opportunity to really see the whole episode, so when I do perhaps I can add some more ideas. In the meantime, you may want to check out their website.
Some people may not feel that Survivor is appropriate for young children. My DD has watched it since the first episode and yes there were a few uncomfortable issues, but we have always watched it as a family and discussed things that we agreed with in the show and things that we didn’t. We have been able to have many interesting ethical discussions and a few conversations about the difference between real life and cyber life. Fortunately, the advent of On Demand and the internet has helped alleviate some of DD’s stress over choosing tv over real life. Now I try to use her tv addiction to encourage learning. II also find it to be a great behavioral persuader. There is nothing that gets DD to rethink her behavior faster than the threat of loosing tv privledges on the night of Survivor.
If your child is like DD, let’s ban together and come up with some activities that can expand their learning while they follow their interests.
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