Geography

Activity 1: About a floating village

In this activity you will learn about life in a floating village, Kompong Khleang, where in the wet season the area floods, but in the dry season the waters recede and houses sit 10 metres above the ground.

Key inquiry question: How have people adapted to life on a floating village that experiences great seasonal changes?

Location and features of Tonlé Sap

1. Look at the Map of Cambodia (on the right) and locate Tonlé Sap lake. The village of Kompong Khleang, which is not marked on the map, is situated by Tonlé Sap Lake.
2. As a class, discuss the physical features of the lake and the surrounding area.

About Kompong Khleang

Visitors to the floating village in Cambodia are amazed at how the residents have adapted to an ecosystem that changes drastically with the seasons.

1. Discuss with another student what it would be like to live in a place where half the year you can only travel by boat and the other half you climb down 10 metres to farm on huge flat fields.
2. Look carefully at the picture of Kompong Khleang (on the right).
3. Use the See–Think–Wonder routine to see the human structures in the photograph that are different from your neighbourhood.
4. Describe why you think these are the way they are.
5. Wonder, or raise questions, about things in the photograph you may not understand or want to learn more about. Discuss these with members of your class.

Daily life

1. Identify at least five human activities that you think are most important to how you would live in a floating island setting.
2. Describe how your daily life would be different in the wet and dry seasons.
3. Make a list of five things you do every day that would be very different in the wet season when your house is surrounded by water.
4. Make a list of five things you do every day that would be very different in the dry season when your house stands on stilts 10 metres off the ground.
5. Write five questions about aspects of daily life in Kompong Khleang that you would like to find out about.
6. Use these questions when you are searching for information later in this module. 

Activity 2: Living with seasonal change

In this activity you will investigate how people live on Tonlé Sap lake and gather information from photographs about daily life in Kompong Khleang village.

Key inquiry question: How can communities adapt to seasonal flooding to take advantage of both wet and dry seasons?

Gathering information

Very little written information is available on the internet about what it's like to live in Kompong Khleang. However, by sifting through a range of sources and looking closely at photographs, you will be able to gather more information.

1. Begin with your own ideas and build your knowledge by using the lists you created in Activity 1.
   • Five activities in Kompong Khleang based on a single photograph
   • Five things in daily life that would be different in the wet season
   • Five things that would be different in the dry season
   • Five questions you would like answered
2. Look at the map of Tonlé Sap lake (on the right).
3. Read about the Tonlé Sap Lake & Prek Toal Bird Sanctuary. Use the subtitles, captions and images to create a list of facts about life in the floating village.
4. When you have enough information, write a diary entry about life in the floating village. Be willing to change your mind if the facts from this brochure tell a different story from the one you imagined.
5. Using the images as a guide, consider what people might be talking about, what they eat, think and care about.
6. Watch the video about Cambodia's declining fish stocks.

   Cambodia's declining fish stocks
7. Write notes on things you find interesting or imagine are happening.
8. Read the Life on the Tonlé Sap blog entry.
9. Use it only to check your facts one last time. Is there anything you think that might not actually be true?
10. Add or delete anything from your notes that will help you write a factual account of daily life in Kompong Khleang.

Activity 3: My diary about life in a floating village

In this activity, you will write and publish a blog entry, based on your imagination, of a child living in Kompong Khleang.

Key inquiry question: What would it be like to live in an area where every year it goes from dry to flooding?

Writing a blog

An international project is creating a website that will gather together blog entries from children all over the world on one day to create a snapshot of a day in the life of the world’s children. The project team has come to your village and selected you to write a blog entry about one day in your life.

Before starting, consider that for centuries villagers along the flood plain of the Tonlé Sap have lived in harmony with the ebb and flow of this 'pulsing heart' of Cambodia.

1. Decide if you will write about life during the wet season or the dry season.
2. Check your facts about the weather and conditions by looking at the climatic graph of Siem Reap, the largest city near Kompong Khleang.
3. Choose a month from the graph and note the temperature and average number of days with rain.
4. Date your diary entry in your chosen month and include details from the climate statistics to make your entry more realistic.
5. Write a diary entry describing what the main events of your day might be like. Consider what you have seen in the photographs, your imagination and the resources you have explored.
6. Re-read the entry to see if you have more ideas and details you'd like to add now that you are going to publish the writing.
7. Consider exchanging your diary entry with a classmate to see if you can improve on it. Use this as a source of inspiration but don't copy another's ideas and imagination.
8. Look for images you can legally use to illustrate your diary entry.

Collecting images

1. Save images you find from the collections below to your hard drive so you can later upload them.
2. Explore the collection of Tonlé Sap images in the Wikimedia Commons. If you use one of these images, make sure you link back to the author cited.
3. Find an image from the collection. Go to the Creative Commons search page. Enter 'Kompong Khleang' in the search field. Un-tick the checkboxes for 'use for commercial purposes' and 'modify, adapt, or build upon'. Make sure the 'Flickr' button is selected in the panel. Click the large green 'Search' button. View the thumbnail images in 'medium' size so you can get a better view of what’s shown. If you use one of these Creative Commons images, make sure you link back to the author cited.
4. Share your masterpiece with the world, for example, as a blog.

Activity 4: Reflection

You have looked at photographs of people living in a very unusual environment.

You have explored more photographs and online resources to get a better idea of what life would be like living in Kompong Khleang.

You took all these ideas and shaped them into a piece of creative writing where you imagined a 'Day in the life'.

1. Now, reflect on your thoughts and feelings about how it would be to live in a place where dramatic changes in the environment are not tragedies, but regular cycles that you and your community adapt to and live with happily and in harmony.
2. Respond to the prompt or freely reflect on what you have learned: I used to think … but now I think …