Welcome to our week on the Brazil Amazon Rain Forest! This week we made a Rain forest Diorama to help us understand the layers of the rain forest. It was super fun to make, and the kids learned a lot about the rain forest in the process!
Supplies:
- 3 cardboard boxes
- Green & blue tempura paint and paint brushes
- Scissors (or knife, I cut the holes in the boxes)
- Paper Towel cores
- Clear Packing Tape
- White craft glue
- Green and Brown pipe cleaners
- 1 package plastic rain forest animals
- Fake greenery, flowers, moss etc.
STEP 1: Stack boxes on top of each other and mark where you want your paper towel tree trunks to go. Using scissors or knife cut holes for the trees. You may want have an adult do this part!
STEP 2: Using green paint, cover the entire inside of each box and allow to dry. On the bottom box make sure to paint a blue river winding down the center.
STEP 3: Once paint is dry, stack boxes in place and glue with white craft glue. Next, insert tree trunks and tape together with packing tape. Add pipe cleaners by twisting them together and around the tree trunks.
STEP 4: Next add animals, flowers, and remaining embellishments. If you would like, you can use small pieces of paper to label each layer of the rain forest.
Forest Floor: The floor of the forest is teeming with animal life, especially insects and arachnids (like tarantulas). The largest animals in the rain forest generally live here, including gorillas, anteaters, wild boars, jaguars and people.
Understory: The understory is a dark, cool environment that is under the leaves but over the ground. It contains short, leafy, mostly non-flowering shrubs,, vines etc. Animals include insects like beetles, lizards and small mammals. Larger animals such as jaguars spend a lot of time on branches surveying the area for prey.
Canopy: The canopy consists of the upper parts of the trees, it is full of insects, arachnids, birds, mammals (monkeys, orangutans) reptiles, vines, mosses, lichens and orchids.
Emergents: The emergents consist of the tops of the tallest trees. It is full of birds and insects.
Want more information on the rain forest?
Here’s a great site for kids called Kids.Mongabay.Com
I hope you have fun making your own rain forest diorama! Make sure to comment if you have pics to share! I’d love to see what other people come up with!
Click here to see the rest of our Expedition Earth activities on Brazil!
Project was successful
Hello, EE looks amazing and I look forward to doing it with my 2nd grader next year. I’m trying to figure out a semi daily timeline and am wondering about how much time EE takes a day? Thanks!
Hi Erica,
This looks like so much fun! I’m working on a blog post and would like to link to your post in it, if that is ok? Thanks so much for sharing such great ideas!
I did it with my kindergarten and 1st grade Aftercare program this last week. We really enjoyed it and was finished awesome.
Thanks a lot.
Bradinova leyva, from Little Dude Ranch academy, WPB, FL.
I have a question does each child complete a project or do you complete one project as a class?
It’s totally up to you. My kids like to do their own projects usually. But for larger ones like this I usually suggest we do it together so we don’t have four rainforests LOL! But again it’s totally up to you!