Make an Amazon Rainforest Mural to help familiarize your students with the animals, plants, and foodwebs present in this habitat. To make your mural, you will find the copy-ready animals and plants (that just need to be colored and cut out), text about each animal on a copy-ready plate, a text plate template for adding your own text or additonal animals and background suggestions. Each Mural comes with a food web hand out and two levels of labeling pages.
Rainforests all over the world are being cut for timber and burned for ranch and farm land, even though the soil is so lacking in nutrients that cleared land is good only to grow crops for about three years. Then more rainforest is cut or burned, and all its living things are lost. If these plants and animals don’t exist in another part of the jungle that remains untouched, they are lost forever — some before they are even discovered.
People are just beginning to realize the importance of the rainforests. Many of the medicines found there cannot be made in the laboratory. The rosy periwinkle, found on Madagascar, has been discovered to contain a cure for a type of leukemia, a deadly disease of the blood.
Perhaps most importantly, as tropical rainforests absorb and release water like a great green sponge, they also absorb carbon dioxide made by cars and industry all over the world. Then, like a giant filter, they send fresh oxygen into the air. Many scientists think that in this way the rainforests actually help to control the world’s climate. Cutting down the rainforest does affect the entire earth.
