Rain Forest

What's really green, has lots of trees, rains and lots of different animals?   .... a RAIN FOREST!!  This past week the preschoolers learned about rain forests and the animals that live there. 
Our letter of the week was the letter Cc.  We made a simple cotton ball Cc.  We glued cotton balls to form a letter C.We discussed the sound that our letter makes and then went around and found some items that began with the letter Cc.
As we journeyed our way into the rain forest we first watched a video about.  The video was a 'tour' of the rain forest and all of the trees and waterfalls!! (Waterfalls were a huge hit during the movie, there were a lot of 'WOOAH's!!!)  The background music to the video was the sounds of the rain forest - including the rain and all the animals.

The main animals that we focused on were the snakes (boa) and monkeys!! We made patterned snakes using our shapes.  After we did our patterns I let the students make their own snakes.  Here are some of their creations.
We talked about the Boa and saw some pictures of it.  I had some boys say that they have a boa in their backyard and that their dads ran it over with a lawn mower.  Oh the things that they say! :)

 

 

 

 

 

We also watched a movie with clips of monkeys.  We learned that monkeys carry their babies on their backs.  We grabbed our bean bags and started to walk around like monkeys with our "baby" on our back.  We bent over, placed the bean bag on our back and started to walk.  We had some very cautious mommy and daddy monkeys during this activity. :)  We also tried crawling with our baby monkeys.  It was a lot of fun!

 

Our craft for our monkey theme was a very simple monkey on a vine.  These hung very low, low enough for the preschoolers to take a little jump and hit it.  :)  These monkeys really added to our rain forest theme!

 

 

Since there are a lot of trees and vines in the rain forest, it tends to get pretty hard to see all the animals.  So we just had to make binoculars!! We glued two toilet paper rolls together, painted them, added stars and string and waalaaa instant binoculars!!  We shut off the lights, had the rain forest movie going with the sounds and went for an adventure in the rain forest using our binoculars.