Jungle Word Search
- BEETLE
- MOSS
- RAINFALL
- GECKO
- TREETOP
- VINE
- MONKEY
- ANTEATER
- SLOTH
- MANGO
- TOUCAN
- THICKET
Created for free at puzzleandprint.com
Jungle Word Search
Rainforest animals, and the green they live in.
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Jungle Word Search, Answer Key
- BEETLE
- MOSS
- RAINFALL
- GECKO
- TREETOP
- VINE
- MONKEY
- ANTEATER
- SLOTH
- MANGO
- TOUCAN
- THICKET
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Four sheets, each with a different job. Every one is a two-page PDF, the puzzle, then the answer key on its own page.
Jungle word search, large print11 × 11 · 7 words · EasyDownload PDF ↓
Jungle word search, everyday14 × 14 · 11 words · MediumDownload PDF ↓
Jungle word search, more words15 × 15 · 14 words · MediumDownload PDF ↓
Jungle word search, challenge17 × 17 · 15 words · HardDownload PDF ↓Every sheet here is free to print as often as you like. If one saved you time, the tip jar is on Ko-fi.
A jungle list does something an animals list cannot: it puts the creatures in a place. Sloth and jaguar sit beside canopy and creeper, so the sheet carries the habitat as well as its inhabitants, which is usually what the topic is actually about.
The names are a good length for a middle-sized grid. Thirty-one of the forty are five to seven letters long and none runs past nine, so even chameleon and armadillo are long enough to be worth hunting for and short enough not to swallow a row of fifteen squares.
Several of these are words children have heard without ever reading: they know a toucan by sight long before they can spell one. That gap is where the puzzle earns its keep, because finding a word letter by letter is what closes it.
It pairs well with a zoo trip or a rainforest topic. Build a sheet from the animals you are going to see, do the puzzle in the car, and the names arrive already familiar.
Which jungle animals live in which rainforest
Most of the jungle animals on this list live in the rainforests of Central and South America, but not all of them. JAGUAR, SLOTH, TOUCAN, MACAW, ANTEATER, ARMADILLO, IGUANA and HOWLER, a monkey named for its call, are all from the Americas; GORILLA lives in Africa, LEMUR only on Madagascar, CHAMELEON mostly in Africa and Madagascar, and PYTHON in Africa, Asia and Australia. TAPIR is the one that crosses the world, with species in South America and in Southeast Asia. That makes the list a sorting task for a rainforest unit built on one continent: which of these would you meet in the Amazon, and which would you not.
Some of the names are less precise than they look. PARROT, MACAW and PARAKEET are all parrots: a MACAW is a large, long-tailed one from Central and South America, and a PARAKEET a small, long-tailed one. PANTHER is not a species of its own but a name for a big cat, used for a black leopard or jaguar and, in parts of North America, for the cougar. GECKO, IGUANA and CHAMELEON are all lizards, so LIZARD on the list is the group name for three of its neighbors, which gives a child a neat way to show they understand the difference between a kind of animal and a group.
Which jungle sheet covers the animals, the plants or the weather
The large print jungle sheet covers the famous animals, the everyday sheet mixes animals with plants, and the last two bring in the longest names and the insects, with the weather words on the challenge sheet alone. Large print is the rainforest poster: MONKEY, PARROT, TOUCAN, JAGUAR and SLOTH, with CANOPY and ORCHID, seven words of five or six letters on an eleven-square grid where everything runs across or down. The everyday sheet is the most mixed, putting GECKO, MACAW, TAPIR, LEMUR and PANTHER beside BAMBOO, VINE, MOSS, PALM and MANGO, which makes it the one to use for an animals and plants sort. BAMBOO is worth pointing out there, since it is a grass, the tallest in the world, and not a tree.
The more words sheet carries the three longest names, ARMADILLO, CHAMELEON and BUTTERFLY, at nine letters each, alongside the crops MANGO, PAPAYA and COCOA. MANGO is the outsider among those, from South Asia, while PAPAYA and COCOA both come from the American tropics. The challenge sheet reaches the forest floor: CICADA, TERMITE and BEETLE join BUTTERFLY as its insects, and HUMID and RAINFALL, the only weather words on the list, are both on it. Its shortest words, COCOA and HUMID, are five letters long, so the challenge lies in the backwards and diagonal words rather than in anything small.
Common questions
How is this different from the animals list?
The animals list is forty mammals from around the world, while only ten of the forty words here are mammals; the rest are birds, reptiles, insects, plants, parts of the forest and two weather words, HUMID and RAINFALL. The two lists share just four names, MONKEY, SLOTH, GORILLA and LEMUR, so a class that has done one can do the other without meeting much twice.
Which words will younger children struggle with?
CHAMELEON, ARMADILLO and BUTTERFLY are the long ones at nine letters, with ANTEATER, RAINFALL and PARAKEET close behind at eight. None of the six is on the large print or everyday sheets, where nothing runs past PANTHER at seven letters, so start there; when a child is ready for the longer names, lower the word count in the maker rather than the grid size, so the long words still have room.
Is a jungle the same as a rainforest?
Not quite: rainforest is the whole forest, while jungle usually means the thickest, most tangled parts of it, where enough light reaches the ground for plants to grow densely. Most people use the two words interchangeably, and the list does too, which is why CANOPY, THICKET and CREEPER all appear on it.
Want to know when new printables go up?
New printables when they go up, mostly seasonal, a few times a year.