How Can Teachers Use It?
It would take a really special, patient, and open-minded teacher to explore all 21 mini-books with an entire class, but a few books stand out with good classroom potential. Use the chapters on dung beetles, snails, and ants and aphids in a unit on insects, showing the brief animations as hooks to introduce the insects and how they use poop. The books on animal poop and skunk farts could be an interesting addition to a unit on animals. Teachers could use a few mini-books individually with kids who are struggling with adjusting to at-school bathroom habits -- the chapters on not holding in the poop when you have to go or on cleaning up if you sprinkle may be especially helpful for one-on-one conversations.
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What's It Like?
WhyKids Poo is a based on a popular Korean cartoon series and includes 21 mini-books, presented as cards with accompanying quizzes. Each card teaches the science behind a fact using an interactive video. Only two cards are available to begin, but once those are seen, new ones are unlocked. The Quiz section tests kids on what they've learned in the card section. After three quizzes are successfully completed, a virtual trading card is unlocked. There are a few very minor translation errors, but they don't interfere with gameplay. The words used for bodily functions are all slang, which may not correspond to terms teachers prefer kids to use. Only a limited number of questions are included in the quiz section, so they're repeated frequently.
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Is It Good For Learning?
Although the topic is presented in a silly way -- sound effects and all -- there’s good info here. Learning topics include nutrition, hygiene, ecosystems and the environment, and animals. It's all presented in no-holds-barred potty talk, including sound effects, and visuals that include bare bottoms and lots of pictures of poop. The topics and cute animations are sure to be engaging to kids, and they'll likely talk quite a bit about what they've learned (which means they may want to re-create scenes like the farting contest).
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The 21 minibooks cover topics from human digestion to fertilizer.
Quizzes reinforce the information in the books.
Kids earn cards by completing quizzes.
Interactivities let kids explore the topics -- often playfully shocking, like this farting contest.
