WOODLAND HILLS : Teacher Creates Rain Forest of Learning

Student teacher Tracy Johnson got a tall order when she asked her combined fourth- and fifth-grade class at Woodland Hills Elementary how they wanted to study the rain forest.

“They all said they wanted to go to one,” she said. “I thought the next best thing was to bring the rain forest to them.”

Over the next six weeks, Johnson and her students transformed the classroom into a paper version of endangered South American and African rain forests. They plastered the walls in black, built three-dimensional paper trees, hung leaves from the ceiling, and arranged live plants around the walls. The students even constructed a cellophane waterfall.

The concept is part of the “whole language” approach to teaching, in which a single theme is used to tie together many subjects, such as math, science and literature, Johnson said.

For the rest of the semester, the class did math problems related to the rate of destruction of the rain forest and wrote compositions on rain forest animals and plants--all in the shadow of paper branches, Johnson said.

Ten-year-old Danny Brennan admitted that after a semester of spending all day, every school day on rain forests, he was beginning to get a little tired of the subject. He still plans to go to a rain forest, “but not a paper one this time,” he said.

Johnson, who graduates from Cal State Northridge’s teaching program this month, said the project allowed her to “get away from a teacher-centered classroom.”

“I don’t want to teach children things they are not interested in,” she said. “They dictate to me what they want to learn . . . that way, the kids don’t think of it as learning.”