Chocolate Grows in the Rainforest

One of the most interesting things we learned about the rainforest is that is where chocolate grows! It’s also been our tastiest lesson from Explore the Rainforest from Experience Curriculum. Chocolate grows in the rainforest but it doesn’t look like chocolate that we’re familiar with. We learned that chocolate beans grow in pods.

Counting Cocoa Beans

Chocolate is made from cocoa trees that grow in the shade of taller trees. Cocoa trees grow cocoa pods that have beans inside them. The cocoa beans are dried and made into delicious treats.

Experience Early Learning Preschool Curriculum

The cards feature numbers on one side and divided spaces on the other side for counting the beans so the cards work well for children who are identifying numbers as well as those who are counting.

From Bean to Bar Booklet

We made a little book about chocolate – From Bean to Bar. It involved putting the pages in order with the cover on top.

Then the children cut apart the three images to glue inside the booklet.

I read the pages and they determined which picture came first, second and third.

Tasting Chocolate

Tasting chocolate was the best part! I pulled together a sample of chocolate we already had in the house. Our son went to the Galapagos Islands a couple of summers ago and brought home a large selection of flavored chocolate, so we tasted some.

Types of chocolate on our plate:

• Mini milk chocolate chips
• Pacari Dark Chocolate
• White chocolate chips
• Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• Pacari Ecuadorian Organic Chocolate bars

The cocoa looked promising, but after they tried it, they decided it wasn’t their favorite.

Cocoa Bean Sensory Play

We didn’t really have cocoa beans, of course, so we played with rice and black beans. Since we haven’t had a sensory play bin for a while, this was a big hit! It was fun to pretend the beans were chocolate and fill the scale buckets so they equaled out.

Check out the Themeschoolers awesome chocolate activities.

More Rainforest Activities

I’ll be adding more Explore the Rainforest activities soon!

• Rainforest Collages
• What’s in the Box? Explore the Rainforest
• Amazon Orchids
• Growing Mold
• Roots
• J is for Jaguar