Yesterday, my daughter and I made our weekly trek to the library. I said she could check out three books:
- A picture book
- A book she wanted to read
- A non-fiction book on a topic she wanted to learn about
She got a Vox Book (a book that has contains an mp3 file so you can listen to the book read aloud) for the first one, a graphic book called Super Narwhal for the second, and a book about cats for the third. Specifically, she got a book about cat breeds.
While Cat went through the first two books several times yesterday, the cat-breed book went unexamined. So this morning, I asked her, “What do you want to learn about cats?”
The answer: the breed of our two outside cats: a brother and sister we got from a friend last fall.
I asked my daughter what kind of breed she thought they were. She thought the black kitty was a Bombay cat. Why? Its color.
“But it has to be the same breed as her brother,” I explained. Bombay cats were gray and black like our second kitty. We were at an impasse. She thought breed was entirely defined by color.
Well, we started with book’s two big categories: short-hairs and long-hairs. From the photos alone, my daughter new our cats were short-hairs. So far, so good. But there were at least twenty breeds and so much variety in color and description that it seemed impossible to find the answer through the book alone.
I wondered if technology had given us a way to figure out breeds, say, through photos.
Welp, it had. There’s an app where you you take a pic and the program automatically checks your cat’s photo against sixty breeds.
My daughter caught our black cat, and I snapped the photo. The result? A domestic (read: American) short-hair.
The article in the book started with a history lessons. American short-hairs came over Britain with the pilgrims and had been here ever since. Their chief characteristic? They’re hunters. They caught rats on the ships they traveled on, took care of wild animals that threatened crops, and even now can catch rats and mice in homes.
Well, our two cats had just killed a rabbit yesterday, and this summer, they’ve been on the rampage taking down voles, a variety of birds, and, yes, even bunnies. The evidence was convincing.
“Does this sound like your cats?” I asked our daughter.
“It does!” she affirmed.
Problem solved.
I felt good about it, and so did our daughter. We may follow up on the detective work with a story about our two American short-hairs so that my daughter can remember what she’s learned.
Note to self: think of a small question like this each day for us to investigate. I just hope they’re all this easy to answer.
Learning Together 