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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Emergents: The emergents consist of the tops of the tallest trees. It is full of birds and insects.

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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!

26 Comments

  1. Wonderful, beautiful! She will really remember that lesson! I dont' know if my guys remember the layers well from when we did Rainforest earlier this yearAngela O- I know you didn't ask me, but I try to take pics of the kids art projects and special lego creations…they usually go in their "memory box" …but I have done a little "year book", too.hthMonique

  2. My 8 year old daughter and I are getting ready to attempt to make this for her 3rd grade science project. She chose to do the rainforest and came across this model herself while doing some research on it. Love your site by the way! I don’t homeschool but I love the crafts and other educational ideas you post and am using some of those at home with my daughter.

    Sara Mullins

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