Saturday, December 3, 2016

Animals of Haiti Memory Game

Through Shutterfly I made a memory game of native animals of Haiti.  As with other tropical islands, Haiti doesn’t have any large native mammals.  Bats are the most common mammal, the solenodon and agouti (hutia) can only be found today in the small patches of remaining rainforest, and the Caribbean monk seal was last seen in the 1950s.  Whales, dolphins, and manatees supposedly can occasionally be seen along the coast, but most of the kids here in central Haiti haven’t seen the ocean.  I tried the game out on the kids I teach each Saturday in a small community in Bohoc, and by the end they knew all 24 animals on the memory cards!  Half of the photos are mine, and half I found on the internet under public domain or for educational use (yay Wikipedia and ARKive).  They then drew their own memory cards on index cards that we cut in half.