Planning a rainforest theme for your students? Looking for all the best living books about tropical rainforests?
If you’re not able to travel, then a book is one of the next best things to explore the beauty of the rainforest and learn about its amazing flora and fauna.
In this post, we’ll share our top 10 rainforest books for kids.
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10 of the Best Rainforest Books for Kids
Take a walk through the cloud forest in The Umbrella by Jan Brett. If you’ve ever read her book, The Mitten, it’s just like that but with rainforest animals and an umbrella. As always, her illustrations are gorgeous. Excellent book to introduce various species that live amongst the rainforest.
This book is absolutely adorable. Highly recommend for little ones. Over in the Jungle follows the classic “Over in the Meadow” rhyme, works on counting 1-10, and includes an “I spy” page. There’s even a few pages at the back where you can learn fun facts about the animals in the book and find out how many babies these different animals actually have.
Another beautiful and lyrical book about the rainforest. In The Rainforest Grew All Around, one page adds on from the previous, using repetition to help build vocabulary. The illustrations are beautiful and there’s bits of fun facts on the sides. A neat tool for learning about the flora and fauna in the rainforest.
The pictures in the National Geographic books are always a win. Stunning, colorful, and real. In their Explore My World Rain Forest book, you can introduce youngsters to the different plants and animals that live in the rainforest and learn about the 4 layers that it’s divided into.
The Great Kapok Tree is by far mine and my children’s favorite rainforest book. The story is about a man who is trying to cut down a kapok tree, but falls asleep while doing so. Then all these different animals come over to him and tell him why the kapok tree is so vital for them (and us). Such a great read for explaining why we need to conserve and protect our natural world.
If your kiddo is a huge Dr. Seuss fan, then you may want to check out If I Ran the Rainforest. In this book, The Cat in the Hat takes his friends on an “umbrella-vator” ride through the different layers of the rainforest. A whimsical, yet informative, adventure about all the different plants, animals, and native people of the rainforest.
7.) A Rainforest Habitat
If you’re looking to hone in on habitats or biomes, then this book may be right up your alley. A Rainforest Habitat is great for first to third graders and is filled with amazing pictures. Informative and interesting.
Another great book for exploring the rainforest biome is Nature Unfolds: The Tropical Rainforest. This book is loaded with informative information and beautiful illustrations of the Amazon rainforest. The fold-out pages help children identify which plants and animals live in the swamplands of the Amazon delta up through the layers of the tropical rainforest.
We love anything written by Gail Gibbons, and Nature’s Green Umbrella is no exception. This book teaches about the climate, layers, plants, and animals that make up a rainforest, as well as discuss why rainforests are so important and ways we can help protect them. Excellent illustrations, per usual.
The Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out series are always a great addition to our home library. In the Rainforest is filled with great information about the ecosystem, animals, insects, and plants of the rainforest. It has bolded vocabulary words, fun illustrations, and additional resources at the back of the book.
What About You?
What are some of your favorite books about the rainforest? Share your children’s top picks in the comments below, and be sure to share this post with other homeschool moms and dads.