from-student-to-teacher

bestdayofmylife:

WE’RE BUILDING A RAINFOREST!

sorry for my sparse posting lately, i’ve been completely overwhelmed with building our 3rd grade rainforest. it’s hard work friends!

to give you a little background, our class has been studying the amazon rainforest all year! and our culminating project is to build a rainforest in the whole back of our classroom! then we invite the other classes from the school to have tours of our rainforest. IT’S INTENSE (and awesome).

so today i’m sharing with you how to build some rainforest plants!

so far the kids have been focusing on making bromeliads, epiphytes, and leaf litter. 

• leaf litter is the easiest (and for the kids, the most fun) because all they have to do is tear up brown paper bags, we’ll cover the floor of our rainforest with this torn paper.
• bromeliads are a super favorite too, true bromeliads don’t look exactly like ours, but we like to think of them as a mix between the large leafy plants and tropical flowers which we will use to decorate trees and vines in our rainforest. to make them we used two pieces of tissue paper cut in half. then we folded them into a fan, folded the fan in half, stapled the bottom and spread the sides out to make a big circular flower. then we opened the two pieces of tissue away from each other to give them a bit more volume!
• for the epiphytes, which are air plants that grow in the emergent layer of the rainforest, we painted toilet paper tubes green. then we cut up green paper into long strips and taped them to the inside of the tube.

we’ve got bags full of these great plants at this point in our rainforest building! soon the kids will start working on more specific plants that will take more creativity like pitcher plants, and liana vines. over the past few days we’ve started our life-size animals and i’ll post about building those soon! 

p.s.- if anyone else has built a rainforest before and has other ways of building plants i’d love to hear about it!!!