Rainforest Ecosystem Project

Today I am proud.  Not only did my daughter do a wonderful job making a rainforest model, but I came up with the idea almost all by my self.  At the doctors office I saw this in a magazine.  My first thought was, well my first thought was, "What a lot of work for something my kids would destroy in minutes."  My second thought was, "that's a perfect way to divide the layers of the rainforest.  Then we can talk about which animals live on which layers."  So that is basically what we did.  This project was special for my crafty 8 year old, I would have had to do more work with my impatient 5 year old.

First we traced some circles:

Then I drew the lines for the trunks:

 Then the cutting, child scissors and cereal boxes didn't work well so I ended up having to cut out the circles:

 All that was left was to turn the pieces into a tree:

 We used straws both to keep the trunk pieces from flopping and to keep the middle layer from sliding:

 Charry used lots of tape to keep it together:

 Then she made it green with construction paper leaves:

 She seemed to especially love tearing paper today:

 We added ribbon vines:

 Then the fauna:

 The animals were a combination clay and googly  eyes:

 She had an impressive variety, can you name the animals:

Toucan, eagle, alligator, frog, panther, snake, python, orangutan, monkey and butterflies

 She took care to place each in its proper habitat:

 I for one love how it turned out:

 Notice the snake hanging in the vines:

We used rainforestanimals.net for information on what animals live in a rainforest and which layers they lived in.