Rhyming Prompt: December 7
The orangutan’s name means “man of the wood”
And they’re known for being both clever and good.
In tropical forests they spread seeds around
And help guarantee healthy plants will abound.
Of all the great apes, they’re in the most danger
Of going extinct, and what’s even stranger,
People don’t know how amazing they are!
Let’s learn about them, then let’s make them all stars.
If all our friends give the orangutans aid
Maybe their homes won’t further degrade.
A closeup image of the prompt for December 7. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a silver seal with a gold embossed frog in the righthand corner. It is propped in a lit Christmas tree.
Download the prompts for December 5-8 here as a PDF or here as a Microsoft Word Document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).
Other Materials:
If you would like, some money to donate to help protect threatened orangutans, and some device with internet access.
Suggested Pose:
We happen to have an orangutan friend hanging around, so Frantz has been getting acquainted. Aren’t they cute together?
An image of Frantz the frog nestled inside the arms of a large plush orangutan. The prompt for the day is sitting on the couch before them.
Activity:
Spend some time learning about orangutans with your kids. You might want to check out this page from National Geographic that has lots of great information, or this page from the San Diego Zoo that has an excellent orangutan call and printable coloring page. We’ll do our best impressions of orangutans, trying to move like them, sound like them, and think like them. And then we’ll talk about more about the rainforest, how orangutans live in the rainforest, and why we need to protect the rainforest—not just because of climate change, but because without it, orangutans will not be able to survive. Once we’ve had that conversation, we’ll be making a donation to the Orangutan Foundation International and to the Rain Forest Action Network, both of which do crucial work to protect orangutans and the rainforest. The donations, of course, are completely optional.
Rationale:
This exercise is building on yesterday’s. By chatting about how palm oil in the snacks in our kitchen can drive deforestation, and how deforestation can drive climate chaos, we started to help our kids understand why they should extend empathy toward the environment. But, as we’ve already discussed, humans are more capable of empathizing with the familiar. A 2013 study that used neuroimaging to investigate empathy revealed that our brains are actually wired to register the closest members of our social group as overlapping with the self. Their concluding hypothesis “is that altruism motivated by empathy may require some level of overlap in the neural representation of self and other—one that conveys information about this extended self to other brain systems responsible for motivation and action” (Beckes et al., 2013, p. 676). If our brains are built to empathize more naturally with what is familiar—so familiar that it almost seems like an extension of the self—asking them to relate to something that is nothing like us is an almost insurmountable ask. I can think of fewer things I am likely to confuse with my “self” than an ecosystem a continent away, and I’m an adult; my children are still developing empathetically. So how do we make it work?
By introducing the orangutans, and situating them firmly in the context of the rainforest, we can hopefully give our kids a relatable tether for an abstract concept. Orangutans have a lot of human features and they’re adorable to boot, so they’re about as relatable as an animal can be. Of course there are lots of reasons for our kids to want to protect the rainforest, but knowing these distant relatives face extinction if we don’t can help us generate a sense of urgency. My kids absolutely love The Lorax, but they’re not particularly emotional about the situation until those brown Barbaloots start getting the crummies. If we can picture a Barbaloot, or an Orangutan, as one relatable victim of the compounding calamity of deforestation, we have a better chance of expanding our empathetic capacity to include less charismatic components of delicate biosystems, too.
Book Recommendation:
We’ll be reading I am Jane Goodall, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos, today. The book doesn’t discuss orangutans specifically, but I love it because it shows the importance of perseverance, critical thinking, and acting empathetically across species-lines. My kids love the comix-style illustrations and the biographical information at the end. You can watch a read aloud here.
An image of the cover of I Am Jane Goodall, by Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos.
References
Beckes, L., Coan, J. A., & Hasselmo, K. (2013). Familiarity promotes the blurring of self and other in the neural representation of threat. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(6), 670-677. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss046