Category: lesson plan

Resources to Prepare a Plant Diversity Course by Bruce Kirchoff

A free plant diversity course by Bruce Kirchoff is now available to all educators. Here is a summary of his open-access teaching resources available online for download and…

Activity/Presentation: Specimen Stories by Lena Struwe

This teaching module uses the often hidden information about a plant, a place, and a person connected through a herbarium specimen and how students can investigate it. Herbarium…

Activity: Jelly Bean Evolution Assignment, by Lena Struwe

In this assignment developed for beginning college level students by Lena Struwe at Rutgers University, the concepts of natural and artificial selection, as well as Lamarckian evolution, is…

Activity: Botanical Home Products, by Amy Berkov

What kind of and how much botanical diversity can you find in the products in a a home, or just in a bathroom,  freezer, fridge, or pantry?  Go…

Activity and Manual: How to take good and bad photos of plants for online plant identification, by Lena Struwe

This is an assignment I use in my Plant Diversity and Evolution class the week before they start their iNaturalist project.   The students learn how to take great…

Online course: Intro to Alaska Flora, by Stefanie Ickert-Bond

The online college class Intro to Alaska Flora from University of Alaska Fairbanks includes fantastic components developed by botany professor Stefanie Ickert-Bond. These online resources are available for…

Activity: Toxic plants in the emergency room – fast and furious botanical role play, by Lena Struwe

Emergency Room (ER) toxic plant role play for Botany classes Developed by Dr. Lena Struwe (lena.struwe@rutgers.edu) This is the activity I presented at the Botany 2018 meeting as…

Activity & Book: Shanleya’s Quest – A Botany Adventure for Kids Ages 9 to 99, by Thomas Elpel

This innovative book and its 52 playing cards with flowers and families on them comes with instructions for 5 different card games to enhance learning of major family…

Activity: Morphology Bingo, by Lena Struwe

Get your students to run around outside the classroom and dig through the weeds in the lawns to find examples of obtuse, spinose, calyx, capsule, stamen, trichome, and…

Activity and Article: Market Botany, by Chris Martine

College-level course module exploring the diversity of plant species available for sale at a local grocery store. Survey data are analyzed by calculating measures of species richness and…