Activity: The class reads a journal describing life in the rain forest, with its many sights and sounds. Students identify descriptive words in the journal and create their own rain forest poems or journals.

1. Share a printout of the “Journey Through the Rain Forest” site with your class. Ask students to read the journal about the photographer’s experience in the rain forest, underlining descriptive phrases. (With younger children, you may want to read the journal as a class or in small groups, then have them write down descriptive phrases.)

2. As a class, review the words and phrases they noticed and write them on the board. How does the author use the different senses, such as sight, hearing, and smell, to describe the rain forest? Identify the different words you listed on the board. Label them as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. What new things have you learned about the rain forest?

3. After the discussion, have students write their own poem or journal about the rain forest using some of the descriptive words they identified. Post the poems near your class rain forest bulletin board.

A Journey Through the Rain Forest
http://photo.net/cr/rara/