Category 4: Local Specialties, Sports, and Health

A: Task:

Design a website that showcases local specialties and unique items or things produced, grown, or raised in your community (i.e. crafts, foods, produce, flowers, animals).

or

Design a website that showcases local or unique sports, games or health programs. (i.e. surfing, skiing, kite flying, rock climbing, jump rope jingles, sporting events).

The theme for CyberFair 2010 is "Believe and Unite!"

Youth are challenged to publish original research projects that focus on how the positive beliefs, behaviors and contributions of their local citizens have the power to improve, preserve and unite their community.

B: Learning Objectives:

1. Students will develop cultural literacy by understanding and appreciating the specialties and unique items of their local communities.
   

2. Students will list local specialties and unique items and explain why they are unique or special.

C: Discussion Questions:

• What are the reasons people have chosen for living in your community?

• What local specialties are advertised in the newspaper, on TV, on the radio? Nationally? Internationally?

• What is important about these major categories: climate, employment, educational opportunities, family-friends, entertainment?

• Are your family's reasons for living in this area the same as for other families?

D: Suggested Starter Activities:

1. Collect articles and pictures which describe unique items or things (crafts, produce, flowers, animals) in their community.
   

2. Research some reasons people have moved to your community. Evaluate the role local specialties have played in their decision to live in your area.
   

3. Checking with the local food stores and supermarkets can serve as a source of information about local flowers and produce. Students may note which produce is grown locally and chart where this produce ends up.
   

4. Display locally grown items on a bulletin board. Classify into sub-groups, such as citrus fruits, leafy vegetables, legumes, etc.
   

5. After interviewing local farmers students will have information that will help them understand the difficulties and problems farmers face these days.
   

6. In conjunction with an investigation of local specialties, students can chart on a map the origins of the fruits and vegetables they eat, investigate the sources of food and clothing in times past, explore the trade restrictions that countries impose on one another.
   

7. Investigate how local producers advertise their specialties. Interview a public relations person to learn how local business people can use their services.
   

8. Local specialties may include art, clothing, sports equipment, etc. Investigate how a particular specialty got started.

E: Examples of Projects

• Wonderful! Pineapple Pastries Being Gold Bricks
  Taipei Municipal Guangfu Elementary School
  Taipei, Taiwan
• The Miracle Fish Taiwan Tilapia
  Yizhu Elementary School
  Chiayi County, Tawian