Exploring the Amazon Rainforest

Jennifer Lee

3rd Grade

Rainforest

Exploring the Rainforest

Objectives

Welcome to "Journey Through the Rainforest"! Our objective is to explore the wonders of the rainforest, including its lush plant life, and unique animal species.

* I encourage each of you to click on each hotspot to discover the beauty and importance of the rainforest.*Take the quiz. *Have fun while immersing yourselves while learning about its diverse ecosystem.

RAINFOREST ANIMALS

Tropical rainforests have lots of animals, and some scientists think there might be animals we don't even know about yet!

RAINFOREST PLANTS

Rainforests are homes to lots of plants. They're great places for plants to grow because they have just the right conditions. In rainforests, you can find thousands of different plants like flowers, trees, and other plants. Some common ones are bromeliads, lianas (vines), orchids, trees with big roots that stick out, and even plants that eat insects, like the Venus flytrap.

In the Amazon Rainforest, there are special plants that help make medicines in the western world. About 25% of the ingredients used in medicines come from there. But, there are even more plants in the rainforest that could help, and scientists haven't looked at most of them. They've only studied 1% of these plants to see if they can be used for medicine. People from Amazon tribes have used some of these plants as medicine for a very long time, like the Brazilian ginseng and the Wasai tree.

Watch this Video and write down what plant stuck out to you the most. You will write this in your journal.

The Amazon Rainforest has lots of plants that make tasty fruits. There are about 3,000 types of fruit, but in the western world, we mostly eat around 200 of them, like passion fruit and açai berries. Lately, scientists are exploring new superfoods from the Amazon. They're checking out fruits like 'aguaje' and 'cocona berry' because they might be really good for your health. These fruits have many vitamins and could be very healthy to eat.

Find the invisible button on this page. Once you do that, you will click on it and a youtube sound clip will pop up. You will close your eyes and listen to the sounds. After that, write down in your journals how that made you feel. After that there is a link to the National Geographic for kids site about the Amazon Rainforest.

In the Amazon Rainforest, there's an amazing variety of plants and animals! People believe there are about 40,000 kinds of plants, 3,000 kinds of fish, 1,300 types of birds, and 430 different mammals. And guess what? There are also a whopping 2.5 million kinds of insects living there. Many of these animals and insects live up high in the treetops of the rainforest, in what we call the "canopy." It's like a big, wild, and colorful jungle up there!

In the Amazon Rainforest, most animals are nice, but some can be dangerous. If you meet the big jaguar or the sharp-toothed piranhas in the water, it could be very risky. There are also snakes with venom and frogs that are poisonous, so you need to be careful.

The Amazon Rainforest is the biggest rainforest in the world! It's so huge, it's even bigger than the second and third biggest rainforests together. To understand how big it is, you could fit the UK and Ireland into the Amazon 17 times, or all the lower 48 states in the United States.

The Amazon Rainforest is in a special place called the Amazon Basin. It's like a big bowl where the rainforest sits. And guess what? There's a giant river called the Amazon River that flows through it. This river is like the rainforest's lifeline, giving it the water and food it needs. The Amazon River is super long, about 6,800 kilometers! It's the second-longest river in the world, just after the River Nile. But it's the biggest when it comes to how much water it carries. It pushes out a whopping 209,000 cubic meters of water every second. That's like a huge waterfall that never stops!

People call the Amazon Rainforest the 'Lungs of the Earth' because it does something amazing. It makes about 20% of the air we breathe! It's like the rainforest is working hard to clean the air for us. It also helps to stop something called carbon dioxide from going into the air. There are so many trees in the Amazon, around 390 billion of them! That's almost four times more trees than all the stars we can see in the sky at night. Imagine that many trees - it's like a huge forest that goes on and on!

In the Amazon Rainforest, there are so many trees and plants that sunlight can't reach the ground very well. Only a tiny bit, just 1%, can get all the way down there. That's why it's really dark on the forest floor. And because it's so dark, many animals and insects prefer to live up high in the treetops. Also, when it rains, it takes a long time, about 10 minutes, for the raindrops to reach the ground. It's like a slow and gentle rain in the rainforest!