Discover & Be at home: rainforest

We’ve got some great rainforest activity ideas for you to try at home with your baby, toddler or pre-schooler, as well as a few book recommendations. Read on…

Who doesn’t love a bit of icky slime to play with? Check out this jungle version…

Buggy and Buddy blog do warn that you’ll need to be prepared for the mess but with the better weather now here (sometimes!), why not head outside? This is fun to make and even more fun to play with. Add in some jungle animals and the role playing and sensory aspects come into their own. Enjoy!

Those children old enough to be thinking about numbers will enjoy this frog counting idea.

There’s a little bit of adult prep before you can get going but, as you can see in these instructions from Early Learning Ideas, it’s all pretty simple. If you want to be totally on-theme you’ll need to get yourself some plastic frogs, but you could change this depending on what plastic animals you have at home (if dinosaurs are your thing, you could change the lily pads to boulders, for example). The water beads suggested in the blog add a sensory element to the activity but aren’t essential for the number-learning aspect. Like with all these activities, you can take the core idea and adapt it to your own favourite topics or what equipment you’ve got at home.

This banana leaf sewing activity from Mamacita Spins the Globe is good for hand-eye coordination and, given the inclusion of a needle, might be better for slightly older children.

It can introduce the idea of sewing and also gives more practice with scissors. Try different shaped leaves or stitches to mix it up a bit.  

Our final activity relates to one of our book suggestions: it’s a chameleon painting idea as in Eric Carle’s The Mixed Up Chameleon.

This is super simple but very effective. All you’ll need is a zip-lock plastic bag, a permanent marker and some paint. There’s no limit to the colours you can use and you can use specific ones to illustrate how mixing some colours come up with others (and not just a uniform brown!). Thanks to Munchkins and Moms for this idea.

And so on to our books. This week we thought we’d focus on one author as he’s prolific, iconic and has, rather conveniently, produced several books featuring rainforest animals: Eric Carle.
 

Many of you will know his The Very Hungry Caterpillar but he has a whole host of attractive and fun books to his name.

We’ve already mentioned The Mixed Up Chameleon but we’d also recommend checking out The Very Busy Spider and The Very Lonely Firefly. All Eric Carle’s books are illustrated with this unique bold and colourful style, and all have a positive message underlying the story. We’ve suggested these three but - can you believe? - there are over 80 titles of his to choose from!