To create a rain forest in the class room, get some free carpet tubes and secure them to the ends of the students tables with tape. Next take green umbrellas, open them and place the handle down inside the top of the tubes. This gives a wonderful place to hang the students creations inside your own rain forest!
Dramatic Play Ideas
Rainforest Lookout Station
Hang brown and green crepe paper from ceiling over your drama area or paper bags twisted into vines.
Add a sleeping bag, camping gear, some blocks and red cellophane paper to simulate a campfire, binoculars, paper & crayons with clipboards for stories and a backpack for some forest fun!
For a change, add a pop up tent, flashlights, picnic baskets and play food.
Add books about the rain forest as well.
Tropical Rain stick
What you will need:
Heavy cardboard mailing tubes/or Paper towel tube
Duct tape to seal the tube
Seeds, mall pebbles, rice or dried beans
Adhesive-backed shelf paper
Wrapping paper or ribbon
How to Concoct it: 1. Hammer nails into the tube 1/8 apart, using the spiral seam of the cardboard. 2. Add several handfuls of assorted filler material (rice, beans, etc) 3. Seal each end of the tube securely with tape. 4. Decorate your Tropical rain stick with ribbon, adhesive-backed shelf paper ,or wrapping paper.
Use your Tropical rain stick to create sound of rain. Shake it, twist it to create a variety of different sounds! Lots of fun!!
When my class was studying the Rain Forest, we put coffee beans in the sensory table. If you are a coffee junkie, you will love this.
I have done a variety of different things for this topic. How rainy is the rain forest ? In the Midwest we get an average of 3ft. the Rain forest receives 9ft. We make a chart showing the difference.
the main crops Coffee, Corn and Cacao Bean (Cocoa) and we did a variety of activities with each in sensory and art. Other areas: Anteater math with file folder activities or flannel board. We even made Rain gauges the children could take home and monitor the rain fall in our area. We covered the layers of the rain forest: The bottom ” forest floor” made of soil insects ground animals. Middle layer: “under story” small trees/shrubs Anteaters, lemur, tree kangaroos. And the top layer the “canopy” with tropical birds, toucans. monkeys. We created this in our classroom as we learned the names of the layers. And with our art projects created the animals at the various levels. It was a lot of fun. We sampled fruits, nuts and seeds and made monkey tails ( bananas with Popsicle sticks in them frozen after they were dipped into chocolate. Canoes are a major form of transportation and we constructed a canoe floated down the Amazon river in our classroom. Fern rubbings were also incorporated when we learned about the plants in the lower levels.
The kids love it when we decorate the room for the weekly theme. Have the children decorate large leaves and flowers with glitter. Hang them on green yarn from the ceiling. Also hang green streamers around the room as vines. Also you can have kids decorate rainforest animal patterns and hang them too from the ceiling.
I also saw on the internet a great website www.ran.org. They have great fact sheets on the rainforest and lesson plans that you can adapt for preschool.