Great Kapok Tree Activities: Drama Writing and Animal Masks

\So one fun part of my job is that I sometimes get to pull out kids to do fun stuff instead of test practice. This is what happened last week and the week before. I worked with a group of third graders and a group of fourth graders who had been successful in their test-taking, and we didn’t want to waste their time with more of it before the test. So we learned about Earth Day!

Great Kapok Tree Activities Start with Earth Day Writing

I mentioned previously, in my Five for Friday post, that I had started working with this group of kids, and I shared a couple charts we made. That’s what we did first, before we read The Great Kapok Tree. We also read this freebie article about Earth Day from Rachel Parlett. You can grab it free at TPT and we charted out some basic points about Earth Day.

Using the structure I posted in my Five for Friday, post, the students wrote brief paragraphs about Earth Day and published them on some cute writing paper.

Reading The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry

The next day, we read The Great Kapok Tree.

Adapting a Fiction Book into a Drama

My purpose for reading this book was to, of course, introduce students to reasons for conserving our rainforests, but also, to have them take the fictional story and rewrite it as a drama. I wanted them to think about what would be the role of the narrator, which character voices they would need, and what would be included in stage directions.

We started off together, charting the introduction to the drama. After a conversation about how we should differentiate between the narrator and stage directions (the kids decided that they wanted the narrator to tell the actions, and the stage directions to describe. This was with some guidance, of course!), this is what we came up with:

To teach the parts of a play before students write their own scripts, try this elements of drama anchor chart and graphic organizers.

Writing Drama Scenes and Making Paper Plate Animal Masks

Then, I divided the students up and gave each one a chunk of text that introduced a different animal. I had a small group of students, and there were many animals, so only two students had to buddy up. They wrote their chunk of the story as a drama and published it, using their animal’s fur or markings to illustrate the border.

After that, each student got a paper plate and enough construction paper to fill their every heart’s desire.

Student Rainforest Animal Masks and Drama Scripts

And this is what they made:

Sloth

Yanamamo Boy

Snake

Jaguar (looks pretty tiger-y to me)

Monkey

Porcupine – just noticed she made mistakes in her drama. Poop. Gotta go back and have her redo that one!

Anteater

Toucan (kind of)

Bee…. with a ghostly reflection of myself in the background.

How funny that, in all the pictures, the only one I came out in is the Bee!

There’s also a frog, but he’s not done yet.

Stay tuned for my upcoming hallway display debut: It took me two weeks, but it is almost done!

For more Great Kapok Tree activities and rainforest learning, see how my students built a rainforest museum for Earth Day.

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