Somebody in your house has landed on rainforests, and what you can find is a green blur with a toucan in it. Every book is about the same nowhere: hot, wet, loud, animals from four continents standing next to each other.
This one is about Central America. One forest, in one part of the world, with its actual residents. Capuchin monkeys on the vines, sloths sitting out the afternoon rain, toucans and pale-billed woodpeckers in the canopy, a slender parrot snake, a blue morpho. Twenty animals are listed in the back matter with further reading behind them.
Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal. $19.99.
The science it actually teaches
It is built on layers, and layers are the correct way to teach a rainforest to a young child.
A rainforest is a building with floors. There is the ground, there is the middle, and there is the canopy on top where most of the light and most of the noise are. An animal belongs to a floor the way a fish belongs to a depth, and nearly everything else about that animal, what it eats, how it moves, what eats it, follows from which floor it is on. This book moves up and down that building instead of wandering around one level, which is why a child comes out of it able to place an animal rather than only name it.
Notice what the series formula does here, because it flips. In the snow book, under means underground and colder. Here under simply means below the leaves, and the exotic half is the part up in the air. Same trick, opposite direction. If your child has read both, point at that.
The rain runs on a schedule. Sloths waiting out a thunderstorm is not a charming image, it is behavior, and the reason it is behavior is that in a tropical forest the storm comes most afternoons rather than at random. Weather you can plan around produces animals that plan around it.
And the names are real names. Not a snake, a slender parrot snake. Not a woodpecker, a pale-billed woodpecker. That precision is the difference between a picture book and a first field guide, and it is what lets a seven year old go and look something up.
The child it lands with
Start with the obvious one. A child in the middle of a rainforest unit, at the point where the third generic library book has arrived and they have stopped listening.
Then the collector. Some children want animal names the way other children want dinosaur names, and this book hands over twenty of them with back matter attached, so the wanting has somewhere to go.
Now the honest part about age. This is the hardest of the five. The sentences are longer, the vocabulary is heavier, and the store band of K to 3 is generous at the bottom end. At five it is a read-aloud and you will be doing some explaining. At eight it is independent and it is very good. If you have a kindergartener and this is your first book from the series, start somewhere else.
For a two week unit it will carry the whole thing. Use the back matter list as your checklist, take one animal a day, put each one on its floor. That is a workable plan and it did not cost you a curriculum.
One place to stop and talk
Turn back to any spread with more than one animal in it.
Pick two, and put the question this way: what would this one have to do to get to where that one is? A monkey and a woodpecker can both reach the canopy and they get there by completely different means. A sloth is not going anywhere quickly and does not need to.
Then the harder follow up, which is worth the wait. The rain arrives. What does each of your two animals do about it? A sloth waits. A monkey has options. Different body, different answer, same weather. That is one of the cleanest examples of adaptation your child will get at this age, and it came out of a picture book on a wet afternoon.
What to know going in
The geography is the thing to know, and it is not a flaw.
This book is Central America. If your child's unit, worksheet or documentary is about the Amazon, the cast will not line up, and a few things will look like contradictions when they are only a different forest. That is worth saying to your child out loud, because it is the actual lesson: there is no such place as the rainforest, there are rainforests, and they are not interchangeable. But if you were planning to answer Amazon questions out of this book, you will be doing some translating.
Second, the price. $19.99, the same as the pond volume and double the snow one.
Third, the body text is lyric and the reference material lives in the back. A child who wants labeled facts will want you to turn to the back matter early, and you should.
It is a living forest, so there is hunting in it. A snake is a snake. Nothing in here is frightening for this age band.
Where to get it
Over and Under the Rainforest is $19.99.
Buy this one on demand rather than on spec. Of the five it is the most tied to its subject. Inside a rainforest unit it is the best thing on the Stealth Science shelf for the money, and outside one it will sit untouched while the snow book gets read nine times. It is also the easiest of the five to hand to a relative who wants to buy a serious book for a child who already owns the popular one.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Over and Under the Pond: Why You Cannot See In
Over and Under the Pond: (Environment and Ecology Books for Kids, Nature Books, Children's Oceanography Books, by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
Surprising Sharks: What the Word Shark Actually Covers
Surprising Sharks: Read and Wonder by Nicola Davies
Grade K to 3
Yucky Worms: The Book You Can Check in the Garden
Yucky Worms: Read and Wonder by Vivian French
Grade K to 2
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
