Month: November 2014

Exploration Name: Culture Shock

Exploration Dates: October 6 – November 21

Number of Students: 13

 

Essential Questions:

What are the Khmer Beliefs?
What ceremonies do Cambodians always celebrate?
What is culture shock?
How do visitors to Cambodia feel when they get here and what can we do to help them?

Description:

Culture Shock is the Exploration that studied the culture in Cambodia. We learned about Khmer Beliefs, General Etiquette in Cambodia and Khmer Ceremonies. To learn more about these things we also did the research on the internet to get more ideas. There are many religions in Cambodia and the religion that nearly all of Cambodians believe in is Buddhism. In Buddhism we believe that when people do the bad thing they will go to hell when they die and they will stay in hell until their bad things are paid. Besides this if people do the good things, when they die they will go to heaven or when there is the next life they can (be) born in the rich family. We also learned about the Khmer Ceremonies. There are: Wedding ceremony, Funeral, Water festival and so on. Water Festival is the ceremony used to celebrate the past because Khmer ancestors used to be at war with other countries. So to help them when they were at war, the king made up this ceremony to help the soldiers feel stronger when they rode on the boat to fight. Cambodian culture also has traditional clothes for each ceremony. When people attend the funeral they should wear the white shirt with the skirt or pants. To be sure with the things that we learned, we also went to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat, different temples, and the sculptures on the walls.

Exploration Name: Forest Ecology

Exploration Dates: Oct 7th – Nov 19th

Number of students: 12

Essential Questions:

(1) What is an ecosystem?

(2) What is a natural resource?

Description: An ecosystem is the living things and the non-living things connecting with each other. The one example is algae. Algae take the sunlight for food and fish eat algae and then people eat fish. This is one connection. In Ecosystems class we had a journey book to take notes or write keywords that we don’t know what that word means. In Ecology class the first topic that we learned was tropical forest. We did not just learn only tropical forests but we also learned a lot of kinds of forests like conifers and others. A tropical forest is the forest that has rain a lot all year. We also learned about ecological relationships. Ecological relationships mean that one organism and another organism connect with each other. Ecological relationships are divided in five parts. They are parasitism, commensalism, predator-prey, mutualism and competition. Our Ecology group went to Mondulkiri province to study there. We spent six days at Mondolkiri. We met a lot of people like Bunong people. On Saturday we came back to our school and we shared what we learned.

Visit our blog: https://ligerforestecology.wordpress.com/