Prepare Your Classroom Forest Before Class

Each tree takes a wall space measuring about 32" wide by 55" tall (about the size of a door). You can build your trees on an empty wall, a bulletin board, or on a door. The activity works best if you have three different bark patterns, but if you don’t have enough space (or time) to make three trees, you can make one tree and two stumps.

To make your trees and/or stumps, follow these steps:

• Cut out the pieces of each tree and stump by cutting on the dashed lines of the printouts. Then cut out the moths, following the instructions on the "Moths for Teachers" printouts.
• Arrange the pieces on your wall to make trees and stumps, using glue dots or push pins to hold the paper in place. Watch this video to see how we did it.

Hide the Moths

You are going to hide paper moths for your students to find, and then your students will hide moths for you to find. Put a glue dot on the back of each moth and place it on a tree or stump — hide all nine moths. Put most of them on the bark that match, but put a few on the bark that don’t match, so that they are easy for your students to find.