The Great Kapok Tree: A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest (Rise and Shine)

Product Information

At Kidadl we pride ourselves on offering families original ideas to make the most of time spent together at home or out and about, wherever you are in the world. We strive to recommend the very best things that are suggested by our community and are things we would do ourselves - our aim is to be the trusted friend to parents. Kapok seeds have 20-25% of oil, which is very similar to cottonseed oil. We can use oil from Ceiba Pentandra seeds for cooking purposes. I thought this was a very cute book with beautiful and bright colored illustrations. The book also has a great lesson for the children reading it. Look at the front cover of the book. How many different animal species can you see? How are they similar / different? The story tells about a man asked to chop down a ceiba tree by another man (in what looks like it could be a Panama hat!). One by one, the animals and one indigenous child come to plead with the man to spare the tree, each offering up one of the many reasons trees are needed.

This is a fictional book where a man goes into the rainforest in search of the Great Kapok Tree so he can cut it down. Once in the forest he gets tired and decides to take a nap beside the tree. During this nap many of the creatures that live at the Kapok tree talk to him in his sleep trying to convince him to not cut the tree down. When the man wakes up he realizes the importance of the tree and does not cut it down.Maya said, "We shouldn't take the ecosystem of other animals because if they took our ecosystem, we wouldn't be happy."

Make a glossary of words related to the rainforest. Can you find some examples in the book? Could you write definitions for the words?

Teaching Ideas and Resources:

Use the first line of the book (“Two men walked into the rain forest”) as the starting point for your own story.