And the Rainforest Grew All Around and Around, and the Rainforest Grew All Around

This was a book that was recommended to me by one of my classmates. It is a great way to introduce children to the rainforest, or to wrap up a unit on the plant life cycle. Many young children have heard the song The Green Grass Grows All Around, and this book plays off of that by creating a song/book about the rainforest to the tune of "The Green Grass Grows All Around." On each page a new animal/plant is introduced, and there is a fact box on one side of the page that goes into details about the animal/plant. At the end of the book there is a "For Creative Minds" section that gives teachers and parents extension ideas for the book. There is also recipe for "Rainforest Cookies" that inclues 8 different ingredients that come from the rainforest: cinnamon, banana, sugar, vanilla, sugar, coconut, chocolate, and cashews.

This book starts and ends with "the fluffiest seed that you ever did see" and that makes it a great way to integrate music into a lesson about plant life cycles. This particular song lets students practice their fluency in a call and reply pattern while at the same time introducing them to new knowledge about the rainforest.

I Spy....Steve Jenkins' Style

Most elementary students love I Spy books. There is one student in my second grade class who refuses to get excited about anything, except these books. He would spend hours searching through the scenery to find the hidden objects.

The book, "I See a Kookaburra!" by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page puts this curiosity to good use. It presents six different animal habitats, each with eight hidden animals. The reader has to try to find the animals, and then turn the page to see the illustration with the setting removed. The second page of each habitat tells a little bit about each animal. Not all of these animals are easy to see. In fact, there were at least two of them where I couldn't find more than six animals before I had to peek at the "cheat sheet" on the next page.

The book also contains the following note, "There are thousand of different kinds of ants. They live almost everywhere on earth and can be found in each of the habitats shown in this book. Along with the eight animals in each picture, there is an ant-somewhere. Can you see it?" This gives those expert I-Spy readers an extra challenge.

There is also a neat slide show about how Steve Jenkins makes his books on his website . It shows several of his picture sketches, and a couple pages of his original drafts. This was particularly interesting because it let the reader see how the process starts. Normally all readers get to see is the end product.