Some days even the teacher can learn something.
We’ve got these books from Oxford Press at work that we use for our “storybook classes.” They’re not all storybooks though, but we call the class that since most of them are. The class is mostly for the kids to practice reading out loud and to work on their reading comprehension skills. This month’s book is about rain forests. Odd topic, and one that has all kinds of big words – conservation, deforestation, etc. My boss picks the books, not me. We started it this week, and just covered the first few pages in class, since those are always the toughest. Getting started on a new book is usually slow and some of the new vocabulary can be tough for the kids to pick up on. One of these pages was about animals who were losing their habitats. One of them I’d never seen nor heard of before, and I almost made the exclamation in the title when I turned the page and saw its picture. Here’s a picture of one I found on the net:
Do you know what it is? I sure as hell didn’t.Turns out it’s a Bennet’s Tree Kangaroo.
TREE KANGAROO? WTF?!?
Kangaroos don’t live in trees! They go jumping around and making “boing boing” noises and shit like that.
Not all of them, it seems. I won’t go into all kinds of zoological details here, but I have dug around to find out just what the hell these things are. You can find bucketloads of info on them here. The above photo was taken in the wild, and here are some zoo shots I grabbed from another site.
Oh, and the Bennet’s Tree Roo lives in the Australian rain forest. Since when does Australia have rain forests? Either I’ve not been watching enough Discovery Channel (never mind that I don’t watch TV anymore) or somebody’s been leaving out critical bits of info about the world.I must look into this more….