Geoguide/tigers
Family Activities: Fifth-Eighth Grade
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Tiger Culture

Wild tigers dwell in the forests of Asia and the Pacific. You can find maps of their natural range and a discussion of their current status in the December 1997 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC articles “Making Room for Wild Tigers” and “Sita: Life of a Wild Tigress.”

But there is another tiger—the tiger of legend and popular imagination. Once it was largely the dark tiger of the forest, the “man-eater” of Rudyard Kipling’s prose, hunted for sport, feared and despised. Now it is the friendly tiger, Tigger, of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories. It is the tiger of trademarks—on cereal boxes, on gasoline pumps—and of school and professional sports teams. It is the beloved tiger.

Can your kids name more popular images of tigers, in movies, in books, on television? What is the relationship between the tiger as icon and real tigers?

Together with your kids, write a fictional story of a tiger that combines aspects of the legends and the reality.

Megan Baker of Nova School in Lacey, Washington, contributed family activities for this Geoguide.