This week in the Topic area, we are looking at the plants of the rain forest and how useful they are to human life. 

We know that they are absolutely essential for so much of the wildlife you have been busy finding out about over the past few weeks, as they create habitats and food chains. 

The tribes and people who live in villages within the rain forests use the wood, leaves and vines of different trees and plants for building their homes (shelter), for making canoes, baskets, furniture and hammocks for example.  They use the broad banana leaves as sheets for drying out beans and much of their food and medicines come from the plants of the forest. 

Some of the foods we buy in our supermarkets come from countries of the rain forests and ingredients for our medicines are found growing here too.  

We already know that one of our favourite treats grows on trees...and we'll recap some of our learning about that this week.

We are going to look at 2 rain forests in different parts of the world...in South America and in Africa.  We're also going to look a little wider at Brazil in South America, near where The Amazon is.

If you do watch Rio and Rio2 over the next couple of weeks...while you are enjoying the films, see if you can identify the threats to wildlife that you notice.  We will be talking a bit more about this next week...

Below you can find the weblinks from the slide show.  There is a file all about Ghana and about the growing of cocoa beans.  There is a cocoa bean growing sequencing task (some of you might have sen this before),  there is a plant description activity and with the influence of Rio and carnival colour, there is a file about Brazilian Art for you budding artists to explore. (Please open this file before printing - colour printing warning included!)