The Great Kapok Tree Freebie

The Great Kapok Tree by Lynn Cherry is such a great book, and we had a blast reading it!  I love the way the story draws the reader into the rainforest and makes us think about the environment from the animal’s perspective! 

After we read the book, we talked about the rainforest and learned a bit about each animal in the story us the non-fiction book Rainforest Animals by Maria Lopes.  

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To get ready for our 2^nd lesson, I showed them this youtube of The Great Kapok Tree which is read by                         Mrs. Thomas.  I love finding little youtube gems like this and allowing my students to experience the story in another way.  After we had read it a 2^nd time, I gave pairs of students a part of the story (from my TPT sequencing FREEBIE) and we formed a big circle on the carpet and retold the story.  It took us a few times to get all the animals in the correct order but the kids loved it and they did such a great job acting out their parts! 

To wrap up our lessons we created our own kapok trees! To create the trees, students traced their forearm and hand onto brown construction paper and then created leaves in whatever shapes they wanted.  

I put the youtube video on again and they were amazingly quiet as they created their trees and listened to the book being read; in fact I think we listened to it a few times while they were creating!  Once their trees were completed they cut up the events from the story and put them back together to retell the story.

Feel free to hop over to my TPT store and grab your own Great Kapok Tree sequencing freebie!!

As always, thanks for stopping by!  Please leave a comment and let me know some of the fun ways you have used this story in your classroom!!