Here are lesson plans developed by Connecticut teachers for use with their students.

Feel free to use these lesson plans and to modify them to meet the needs of your own students.

We welcome additional exercises that you develop for use in your own classroom. Please send them to robert.capers@uconn.edu
so that we can post them here, making them available to other teachers.


Flowering times: Are they a-changin'?
Students examine evidence that the climate is warming in Connecticut and
investigate whether this has had an effect on when flowers bloom.

Dating an alien
  In this exercise, students assemble information on non-native plant species -- how they
  have increased in frequency in Connecticut and why they are ecologically important.



Tracking a purple invasion
  Students use an online database to download data on the frequency and distribution of an
  invasive plant and then use the data to plot the sprecies' spread. They also investigate the
  properties of the plant and consider why we might care about invasive plants.



Making a plant collection
In this lesson plan, students collect plants and preserve them so they can be used in
the future for research and education. Then they will become familiar with using online
herbarium data and will respond to questions about the meaning of the information they
find in the "Virtual Herbarium."



Rare plants
Students collect data on plants that are on the state's list of endangered and threatened species.
They plot change in a species' frequency over time and consider why a species may be less
widespread now than it was in the past.