Exploring The Tropical Rainforest

You can click on any of the book covers in the launcher graphic above to jump to screenshots from that book and a brief description of it. You can also access that information by scrolling down this page. After each description, you can click a link to return here and try another title. This unit is included in both Ecosystems Collection A and the full Wonders and Magic of Nature collection.

The anchor book for the unit, Tropical Rainforests, displays a map to show students the band along the equator where this ecosystem is found and uses photographs, sounds, and videos to bring the rainforest up close.

On this example page, students can click the television button on this pop-up grid to view a video of the blue crowned mot-mot in the photo.

The anchor book goes on to introduce the idea of layers in the rainforest, from the upper emergent layer, down through the canopy and understory to the forest floor, and explores the ways animals have adapted to take advantage of the different conditions in each layer.

A pop-up wordbank with vocabulary related to the tropical rainforest is accssible from each page. A student can click any word to hear its definition.

This book follows the anchor book, and provides students an opportunity to show their comprehension of the subject through a series of multiple choice questions. Each set of three questions is preceded by a photograph originally seen in the anchor book to jog the students' memories and make this exercise more than a simple drill.

On this question page, the pop-up grid with the four answer choices for the second question is open. Students would click on an answer to choose it and insert it into the space below the question.

After learning basic facts about the tropical rainforest, students ascend into the trees to explore the rainforest by means of cable wires connecting to platforms at each of the different levels. This book utilizes the choose your adventure format, in which students choose which way to go at the end of each page.

There are eight different paths through the rainforest. Students are encouraged to take notes as they move from platform to platform, so that they can later document their observations, such as these crocodiles they have spotted down below on the forest floor.

When students complete the Rappelling Adventure, they have a chance to write up their observations. A pop-up grid with photos from the adventure enables students to insert one photo on each page of the journal.

They then write about what they saw as they explored the rainforest layers, using the photos to organize their observations. The finished journal is saved and also can be printed.

In this book students go into the rainforest with a guide in search of an elusive animal, the emerald tree boa. This fascinating reptile is so beautifully camouflaged that it is very difficult to see in the lush green foliage.

Close-up photos and spectacular videos give students a rare chance to observe the tree boa, and question pages throughout the book enable them to record their observations "in the field". Their thoughts about the expedition are recorded and saved as a Clicker Writer document.

After students have read The Emerald Tree Boa, they can test their comprehension with this book. Like the Tropical Rainforest comprehension book, photos from the associated book are used in What Do You Know About The Emerald Tree Boa? to remind students of the subject matter before presenting each set of three questions.

This screen shot shows the cover of the book. Like all the books in the unit, there is a button in the upper left that opens a pop-up grid giving the assignment and instructions, and a rocket button in the upper right that returns students to the launcher.

The final lesson in the unit asks students to sort pictures of animals from "Exploring the Tropical Rainforest" and animals from the "Exploring the Taiga Forest" unit.

In this screen shot, the pop-up grid with all the animal pictures is open, and a student is preparing find and click animals that live in the tropical rainforest to insert them into the appropriate cell.