• 65 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Rainforest Writing Prompts

Four layers to write from, a river that floods the trees, a night of sounds, a patch growing back.

Rainforest Writing Prompts

Show all 65
  1. Rain begins on the rainforest canopy. Write how long it takes to reach someone on the ground, and what they hear first.Angle: a roar on the leaves overhead, then the drips, then the real thing.
  2. After the rainforest trees are cut, the soil gets its first full day of sun. Write the day as the soil.Fact: rainforest soil is often quite poor, because rapid decay keeps humus from building up.
  3. There is no bridge. Write how a village on one bank of the rainforest river visits the village on the other.Fact: no bridge crosses the whole width of the Amazon River.

Next step Write about the environmentDraw a rainforest animal

All 65 prompts

The forest floor 13

  • A giant tree on the rainforest floor stands on roots like walls. Write a game of hide-and-seek among them. Fact: buttress roots can grow up to 30 feet tall around a shallowly rooted tree.
  • A ripe fruit drops from the canopy and lands on the rainforest floor. Write the order in which the eaters arrive. Angle: the quick, the careful, and the ones too small to see.
  • A seedling on the rainforest floor has waited years for light. Write the day a gap opens above it. Fact: many seedlings that will one day reach the canopy stand waiting in the understory.
  • A tapir crosses the rainforest floor at an easy walk. Write why the going is easier than a visitor expects. Fact: away from rivers and clearings, the rainforest floor is fairly clear of plants, for lack of light.
  • Look up from the rainforest floor into the understory, the layer over your head, and write the size of the leaves. Fact: only about 5% of the sunlight reaches the understory, and the leaves there are much larger.
  • One beam of sunlight reaches the rainforest floor for a few minutes. Write who gathers in it. Fact: the rainforest floor receives only 2% of the sunlight.
  • The soil of the rainforest floor is poorer than it looks. Write a tree's account of where its food really comes from. Fact: most rainforest trees root near the surface; their minerals come from the top layer of decay.
  • Turn over one fallen log on the rainforest floor and write who was underneath, in the order they left. Angle: the fast ones first, then the slow, then the one that stayed.
  • Write a walk across the rainforest floor by someone who keeps looking up and keeps tripping. First line: The things to see were far above me, and the things to trip on were at my feet.
  • Write about a leaf that falls to the rainforest floor, and how soon it is gone. Fact: dead plants and animals on the rainforest floor vanish quickly; warm, humid air speeds decay.
  • Write about a vine that starts on the rainforest floor and means to reach the sun. Fact: a liana is a woody vine rooted in the ground that climbs trees to reach direct sunlight.
  • Write the rainforest floor as a mushroom that does the cleaning up. Fact: many kinds of fungi on the rainforest floor help decay the animal and plant waste.
  • Write what the rainforest floor smells like after rain, without using the word wet. Angle: old leaves, something sweet that has gone over, bark.

Up in the canopy 13

  • A bromeliad high in the rainforest canopy holds a pond in its leaves. Write one day in the life of the pond. Fact: a tank bromeliad's leaves can hold as much as 10 liters of water, with small animals living in it.
  • A fig seed lands on a high branch in the rainforest canopy. Write its long way down to the ground. Fact: a strangler fig sprouts on top of another tree and grows its roots downward.
  • A harpy eagle perches on the tallest tree and looks down on the rainforest canopy. Write what it watches for. Fact: the harpy eagle perches on emergent trees to look for prey and hunts in the canopy.
  • A kinkajou sleeps the day away in a hollow of the rainforest canopy. Write what the hollow hears while it sleeps. Fact: by day kinkajous sleep in tree hollows or in shaded tangles of leaves.
  • A macaw flies over the rainforest canopy at sunrise. Write the canopy as it looks from above. Angle: green to every edge, until one tree is in flower.
  • An orchid lives on a branch in the rainforest canopy and has never touched the ground. Write how it gets a drink. Fact: an epiphyte grows on another plant for support only and takes its water from rain and debris.
  • Rain begins on the rainforest canopy. Write how long it takes to reach someone on the ground, and what they hear first. Angle: a roar on the leaves overhead, then the drips, then the real thing.
  • Vines hang between two trees in the rainforest canopy like a bridge. Write who crosses in one morning. Fact: lianas can form bridges in the canopy, giving tree-living animals paths through the forest.
  • Write about a sloth in the rainforest canopy whose fur has turned green, and what else lives in that fur. Fact: green algae grow in a sloth's shaggy coat and hide it among the leaves; moths live there too.
  • Write the first rope climb into the rainforest canopy by people who had only ever studied it from below. Fact: true exploration of the canopy began only in the 1980s, with ropes shot up into the trees.
  • Write the notebook page of the first person to count the plants growing on one tree of the rainforest canopy. Fact: by some estimates the canopy is home to 50 percent of all plant species.
  • Write the rainforest canopy as a roof, from the side that gets rained on. Fact: the canopy is a more or less continuous cover of leaves formed by neighboring treetops.
  • Write the weather report from an emergent tree, the tallest in the rainforest, to the canopy below it. Fact: emergent trees stand above the canopy, 45 to 55 meters tall, in heat and strong winds.

The river 13

  • A fish as long as a canoe comes up beside a child's boat on the rainforest river. Write the look they give each other. Fact: the arapaima of the Amazon, one of the largest freshwater fish, can reach 15 feet.
  • The rainforest river rises into the forest every year. Write a fish's first day swimming where tapirs walked a month ago. Fact: every year the Amazon rises more than 30 feet and floods the forest around it.
  • The river is the only road through the rainforest. Write directions to your house for someone arriving by water. Angle: count the bends, name the tree that leans, say which bank.
  • There is no bridge. Write how a village on one bank of the rainforest river visits the village on the other. Fact: no bridge crosses the whole width of the Amazon River.
  • Where two rainforest rivers meet, one dark and one sandy, they run side by side. Write the line between them from a canoe. Fact: where the dark Rio Negro meets the sandy Solimões, they run unmixed for over 6 kilometers.
  • Write a morning on the bank of a rainforest river as an animal that has come down to drink and is not the only one. Angle: who arrives first, who waits, who pretends not to look.
  • Write a rainforest river on the morning after a night of rain upstream: higher, browner, and carrying things. Angle: a branch, a whole tree, somebody's lost paddle.
  • Write about a giant water lily on a still backwater of the rainforest river, as a small bird deciding whether the leaf will hold it. Fact: a leaf of the giant water lily Victoria amazonica can be up to 10 feet across.
  • Write about the pink dolphins of the rainforest river as a gray calf that is not pink yet. Fact: Amazon river dolphins are born dark gray and turn pink as adults.
  • Write the Amazon as it leaves the rainforest and meets the sea, still pushing. Fact: the Amazon is the largest river in the world by the volume of water it carries.
  • Write the journey of one raindrop from a leaf at the top of the rainforest down to the river. Angle: the leaf, the trunk, the litter, the stream, and a long stop in a bromeliad.
  • Write the moment a sailor far out at sea, off the mouth of the rainforest's great river, tastes the water and finds it fresh. Fact: the first European known to sail up the Amazon, in 1500, named it for a sweet sea, Mar Dulce.
  • Write the rainforest river in the dry season, when the sandbars come back. Angle: what has been under water for months, and who gets to it first.

A sound in the night 13

  • A frog calls from a leaf over a rainforest stream at night. Write the search for it by flashlight. Angle: the call stops whenever the light moves. Stand still and try again.
  • A long, sad call comes from a stump in the rainforest night. Write the search for who made it. Fact: the potoo is nocturnal, with a haunting song; by day it perches upright on a stump, looking like part of it.
  • A tree falls somewhere in the rainforest in the night. Write the sound, and what everyone who heard it does next. Fact: when a canopy or emergent tree collapses it leaves a gap, and gaps help new trees grow.
  • The loudest sound in the rainforest night turns out to come from something very small. Write the finding of it. Angle: follow the sound down to one leaf. What is sitting on it?
  • One sound in the rainforest night has no explanation. Write three guesses, each less sensible than the last. First line: It was not a frog. I knew that much, because the frogs had stopped to listen too.
  • Sit still in the rainforest at dusk with your eyes shut and write the sounds in the order they arrive. Angle: one sentence each. Say which you could name and which you could not.
  • Something climbs past your hammock in the rainforest night. Write the sound of it, since you cannot see it. Angle: claws on bark, a pause, a dropped fig. Guess its size from the sound.
  • Write a conversation between two frogs calling across a rainforest pool at night, and translate it. First line: Here. Here. Still here.
  • Write a rainforest night as two lists: the sounds that would put you to sleep and the sounds that would keep you up. Angle: then move one sound from the first list to the second, and say why.
  • Write about being woken before sunrise in the rainforest by a sound you take for a storm, and learning it is monkeys. Fact: the males of a howler monkey group generally call at dawn.
  • Write down a rainforest night for someone who will never hear one: a sentence for each sound. Angle: say how high, how far away, how often.
  • Write the moment in the rainforest night when every sound stops at once. Angle: what stopped them? Give the silence a length and an ending.
  • Write the sound of rain arriving across the rainforest at night, from far off to right overhead. Angle: a hiss, then a roar, then you cannot hear the person beside you.

After the trees are cut 13

  • A bird flies over ground where the rainforest was cut and drops a seed. Write the seed's chances. Angle: sun all day, no shade, rain that lands hard. What does it have going for it?
  • A farmer plants a field where rainforest was cut down. Write the first harvest and the third. Fact: cleared rainforest soil is often thin, and heavy rain quickly washes its nutrients away.
  • A field and a standing rainforest share one edge since the trees were cut. Write one step from the sun into the shade. Angle: say what changes besides the light: the air, the sound, the ground.
  • A monkey that has never touched the ground reaches the place where its rainforest has been cut. Write what it does. Angle: the next trees are a field away. Wait, go around, or come down?
  • A village plants young trees on a hillside where the rainforest was cut. Write planting day as the youngest person there. First line: They gave me the smallest tree and the biggest shovel.
  • After the rainforest trees are cut, the soil gets its first full day of sun. Write the day as the soil. Fact: rainforest soil is often quite poor, because rapid decay keeps humus from building up.
  • One tall tree is left standing where the rest of the rainforest was cut. Write who still visits it. Angle: which birds, at what hour, and where do they sleep now?
  • Two cousins are left a piece of rainforest. One wants the trees cut and one does not. Write the supper where they talk. Angle: each has a good reason. Give their grandmother the last word.
  • Write a patch of rainforest ten years after the trees were cut, as the forest that is growing back. Fact: a forest that has grown back after clearing is called a secondary forest.
  • Write a rainforest that has grown back so well after the trees were cut that a visitor cannot tell, and the one sign that gives it away. Fact: a secondary forest differs from an old one in its mix of species but may still house native ones.
  • Write the first plant to come up after the rainforest trees are cut, and what it makes of all the light. Fact: a cleared area is first colonized by pioneer species, then by shrubs and bushes.
  • Write the first rain on a patch of rainforest where the trees were cut last week. Fact: when rainforest trees are cleared, rain runs off the bare soil and erosion begins.
  • Write the stream below a hillside of cut rainforest twice: before the trees came down, and after. Angle: clear, then brown. What is the brown made of, and where was it last week?

How it works

Each writing prompt on the rain forest here asks for one thing seen or heard in a tropical rainforest. Most carry a checked fact, so they fit a science unit as well as a story.

Read the full guide

The four layers of a rainforest

From the ground up: the forest floor, which gets only 2% of the sunlight; the understory, with about 5% and much larger leaves; the canopy, where most of the largest trees stand 30 to 45 meters tall; and the emergent layer, a few giants above it all. The prompts put a writer in each.

After the trees are cut

These thirteen prompts keep to what can be seen: rain running off bare soil, the first pioneer plants, a field beside standing forest, a hillside being replanted. Forest that grows back is called secondary forest, and two prompts are written from inside it.

  • Choose a layer before you choose an animal. Where it lives decides what it can see.
  • For a night prompt, shut your eyes first and list what you would hear.

Questions and answers

What is a good writing prompt for the rain forest?

One with a fixed place to stand. One beam of sunlight reaches the rainforest floor for a few minutes: write who gathers in it. Or write the weather report from the tallest tree to the canopy below.

Which layer of the rainforest has the most life?

The canopy. The densest biodiversity is found there, and by some estimates it is home to half of all plant species. Exploration of it began only in the 1980s, with ropes fired into the trees; one prompt writes that first climb.

Are there rainforest writing prompts about deforestation?

Thirteen, written for a classroom. They ask what happens next on cleared ground: the first rain, the first plant to come up, a stream turned brown, a planting day, and the forest ten years on.

Are there prompts about the Amazon River?

Yes. The river rises more than 30 feet every year and floods the forest around it, so one prompt follows a fish swimming where tapirs walked a month ago. Another sits on the line where two rivers run side by side unmixed.

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