The
Lesson Plans
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.