Rainforest Play

A Lesson in Comparison

As we set sail from Antarctica back up to South America, we went straight for the Amazon rainforest.  Talk about a lesson in comparisons...

After reading about all of the beautiful plants and exciting animals, I decided to try and help the boys get some perspective on how different it is there compared to our desert home.

So we set out to make a wall chart.

The boys liked cutting out one inch sections of blue paper to represent inches of rainfall for our average yearly rainfall chart.

It's always interesting to observe how the kids progress and grow.  This is the first time Keegan has been interested in cutting in straight lines!

Then we set out to place 8 inches of water that our desert home gets on average in a year.  Eight tiny little inches...

Next we glued on some 10 blocks and then individual blue squares to represent the 70-100 inches of rain that the Amazon rainforest averages in a given year.  Talk about stark contrast.

To bring a more balanced perspective in, I think we'll go ahead and add St. Louis average rainfall at approx 38 inches a year which still pales in comparison...

The boys are convinced that a trip to the Amazon is in our future!  The Emerald Green Boas and Sloths are on the top of their 'wish to see' list!

After reading several books about sloths, the boys enjoyed lazily hanging upside down!  While they enjoyed this briefly, they were unable to keep that S.L.O.W. pace for very long. 

Here are links to some of our favorite Rainforest books:

 

We especially enjoyed the pop-up Jungle book that Mima brought for the boys this summer.  Not only did the pop-ups and jungle sounds ignite thier imaginations, it was also cool to compar rainforests in different parts of the world.  We'll definitely be pulling this out again when we get to Asia and Africa!