I chose the alpaca for my mammal, mainly because I wanted to know the difference between and alpaca and a llama. The Kid's version did not even mention llamas - it said only that alpacas are related to camels. Alpacas live in the Andes mountains, and have very soft wool. As a knitter, I have worked with alpaca yarn and it is wonderful.
World Book Student edition has a bit more information about alpacas. There is more detail about alpaca wool and its uses. It also mentions that they are related to domesticated llamas.
Links are provided for llamas, guanacos, and vicunas. I checked out the llama article and found that alpacas are smaller than llamas.
The country I investigated in World Book Advanced is Guatemala. I have traveled to Guatemala, and can identify personally with information presented in the articles. There is a lot of basic information about the country and its people, as well as separate articles about various cities, important people, and Mayan culture. The information in the right-hand column is mostly presidential papers, but they're interesting to read as well. A person could spend hours clicking from one article, map, or chart to another!
I used World Book Discover to check out Citizenship. Being able to read the article in another language would be very helpful to patrons who do not speak or read English fluently. Being able to listen to the article is also a useful feature. I can see that this could be a good resource for ESL learners.
On a pracitcal note: Two weeks ago (before I even started this Challenge) we had a class of 5th graders visit the library. They arrived with lists of books needed for their reports. To supplement their bibiographies, and provide even more current information, we showed them the World Book Student edition!
Fantastic testimony, Nancy! You are ahead of the curve in using this resource with your patrons! If you haven't, I hope you will try the special features in WB Kids--great, fun learning tools! I did look at World of Animals to see if I could compare alpaca & llama, but they only had llama. :( I learned that llamas are related to alpacas and to camels! Thanks for the comments.
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