Tropical Rainforest Thematic Unit for Third Grade    Created by Alice Allnutt

I. Overview of the Unit:  Third graders will determine questions they have about the Tropical Rainforests of the world.  They will use the Internet, library books, CD-rom, and laser disks to find answers.  Their final product will be a class book and a class multimedia slide show about Tropical Rainforests.
II. Student objectives (taken from the VA SOL's) 

Science:
(l) Adaptations of animals: gathering food, finding shelter, defenses, rearing young, hibernation, migration, camouflage, mimicry, instinct;
(2) Food chains: producer-consumer-decomposer; herbivore-carnivore-omnivore; predator-prey;
(3) Diversity of plants and animals sharing limited resources
Language Arts:
(l) Reading - read and comprehend, make connections between previous and current reading
(2) Writing - draft a descriptive paragraph on the computer, edit for spelling, sentences, indenting, missing words
Social Studies:
Find and label the location of tropcial rainforests on a world map
Math:
Use rainforest numbers to solve math word problems involving adding and multiplying

III. Resources:
Information Books:
    How Animals Hide
    Which Habitat
    What Color is Camouflage
    Life Above the Jungle Floor
CD-rom:  Earth Explorer, an encyclopedia like Encarta or Groliers
Laser disk: Windows on Science: Life Science
Internet Sites:

 
Animals in the Rainforest     http://www.pbs.org/tal/costa_rica/res2/graphindex.html
Tropical Rainforest Animals   http://kids.osd.wednet.edu/Marshall/homepage/animals.html
Rainforest Action Fact Sheet    gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org/00/orgs/ran/animals
Rainforest Action Network    http://www.ran.org/ran/index.html
Kids and the Tropical Rainforest   http://www.ran.org/ran/kids_action/index.html

IV.Lessons

l. Lead a  KWL lesson on the Tropical Rainforest, recording notes on a poster.  Be sure to query the students about some of the science concepts listed above.  Generate a set of questions to be answered. Assign students  or pairs of students to a question to be answered.

2.  Assign students to the Internet computers to complete the Jungle Geography -World Map of Tropical Rainforests.

3. Use the Internet Sites above for students to begin the research.  They will use this Notetaking Sheet.

4. Schedule students to use word processing  (Clarisworks, Word) to draft and edit their information paragraph.  Print out drafts for peer and teacher editing.

5. Schedule students to draw for their paragraph using a computer graphics program (Kidpix, Clarisworks, Hyperstudio).

6. Help students combine their drawings and paragraphs using a multimedia software (Kidpix, Clarisworks, Hyperstudio).  Print as a class book and combine into a multimedia slide show.   Add student voices if appropriate.

7.     Students complete the Monkey Math worksheet, peer checking.

8. Use the Windows on Science laser disks and CD rom disks for general class information lessons and discussions.

9. Encourage students to do research at home on these Internet sites.

V. Assessments
l.   Students create a rubric to evaluate their informative paragraph and drawing.  Self, peer, and teacher evaluations are done using this rubric.

2. Teacher evaluation of Jungle Geography Map worksheet and Monkey Math worksheet.

3. Students create a rubric to evaluate their use of the computer: Internet; word processing, drawing.  Self-evaluation using this rubric and Teacher observation of student use of computer using the rubric.