We love aviation as a classroom theme for all ages. It’s easy to set up your classroom, science and social studies connections abound, and the theme fits in well with all kinds of motivational and character programs. Our linked resources will give you some great computer skills practice, too.

Also check out our Travel Theme and Hot Air Balloon Classroom Theme for more ideas.

Think about a bulletin board:

• Stick Kids Airplanes 6″ Designer Cut-Outs Variety Pack have CTP’s beloved stick kids towing space for messages. These are terrific for putting all the kids’ names on your door, of course, but they can also surround a large airplane on a bulletin board.

• RoomMates Vintage Planes Peel & Stick Wall Decals are highly realistic planes, and they help you get around the lack of bulletin board space a lot of us face now in classrooms. Reusable Wall Sticker Airplanes are the same peel and stick solution, but with brighter, more fanciful planes. Add clouds to complete the picture. Write kids’ names on the clouds, or use them to write class goals and standards.
• Add a 3-D element with Safari Ltd In The Sky Toob toy planes, foam vintage gliders, or have students make their own paper airplanes — hang them from the ceiling all around the room.

Airplane classroom theme slogans:

• Up, up and away!
• Soaring into a new year
• We’re flying high
• High flying readers
• Taking off!
• Aiming high!
• We’re just “plane” great!

Add airplane books to your library table:

• Amazing Airplanes for young readers
• Airplanes by Patricia Hubbell has illustrations that invite close inspection.
• A is for Airplane: An Aviation Alphabet has lots of information; it’s an alphabet book, but there’s so much to read that it shouldn’t be limited to early readers.
• In the Cockpit: Inside 50 History-Making Aircraft is filled with photos and detail about historic airplanes from the Simithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
• Kids’ Paper Airplane Book is for hands-on use. We love this book, and your class will, too.
• The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane introduces the impressive story that every kid should know.

Set up a flight simulator in your computer center. There are plenty of options, but we checked with pilots and have these recommendations:

• GEFS is a free online flight simulator based on Google Earth.
• You can actually get the flight experience within Google Earth. To enter airplane mode,  press CTRL + Alt + A (command + option + A on a Mac). Visit the Google Earth Help Center for more details.
• Microsoft Flight Simulator is probably the most popular flight simulator software for casual use, and it’s affordable. Download a demo.
• X-Plane v 9.0 is more realistic than the Microsoft game, and can actually be used for flight training.

Welcome students with virtual field trips:

• The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force has a virtual tour.
• The Airventure Museum has several.
• The National Naval Air Museum has a wonderful collection of exhibits that make science points, plus exciting programs for students and teachers.
• The National Air and Space Museum offers videoconferencing for classrooms on a regular basis.
• The Virtual Air Museum has an astonishing wealth of data about airplanes from all over the world.
• The Warhawk Air Museum has a 360 degree virtual tour that provides some good mouse practice.

•  NASA’s Beginner’s Guide to Aeronautics leads to pages appropriate to various age and grade levels.
• Build an airplane viturally at AvKids to learn about the parts of a plane (and get some drag and drop practice).
• Scholastic has a cool interactive timeline of flight. Add the dates to your classroom timeline.
• The National Air and Space Museum has a very cool interactive animation that lets you understand and experiment with drag, lift, thrust, and weight. We crashed our plane several times as we learned how these forces interact.
• The National Museums of Scotland has a cool plane building game  that goes into detail about how different aspects of a plane affect its performance in different circumstances.

Bound into summer school or a new school year with a kangaroo theme!

Get your room ready:

• Twisty Noodle has a simple kangaroo outline you can use to create a kangaroo bulletin board from kraft paper. Free Kids’ Crafts has a cool template-based kangaroo craft that would make a good bulletin board, too.
• Sparklebox has a kangaroo theme for environmental print.
• Shapes, Etc. has a PDF with patterns for a kangaroo matching game plus an Australia idea sheet with fun ideas for classroom books and decoratives.
• Teacher’s Friend makes an Outback Adventure Bulletin Board  set with kangaroo, crocodile, and other Australian animals, plus a train and some intrepid explorers.
• Make kangaroo paper bag puppets.

Bulletin board slogans for a kangaroo theme:

• Hop into a new year!
• Bound into math!
• Making great leaps!
• Learning by leaps and bounds!
• Pocket full of books!

Add some kangaroo books to your library table:

• Eric Carle’s Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too? is just as wonderful as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and nobody’s tired of it yet.
• What Do You Do With A Kangaroo? by Mercer Meyer is a whimsical adventure.
• K Is for Kissing a Cool Kangaroo  is an updated alphabet book — K is the only kangaroo page, but you can never have too many alphabet books for your emergent readers.
• A Kangaroo Joey Grows Up has lots of photos.
• Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do! (MathStart 3) has kangaroo and friends working with multiplication to create a birthday party.
• Jump, Kangaroo, Jump! (MathStart 3) is a bouncy introduction to fractions.
• Katy No-Pocket, illustrated by the author of Curious George, is a book all about problem solving, as a surprisingly non-marsupial kangaroo tries to figure out the best way to carry her baby.
• My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch , by the wonderful Graeme Base, is out of print, but your library may have it or you can find it used. Grandma rides kangaroos in this beautifully illustrated story.

Kangaroos are very interesting creatures. Open the Kangaroo Valley live web cam and see if you can see some kangaroos (if it’s night time or there aren’t any ‘roos around, check out the gallery). Notice the way the animals move, and have your students try to move in the same way. Discuss the fact that kangaroos live only in Australia and New Guinea and find Australia on the map or in Google Earth.

Are your students a little older? Let them explore the Kangaroo Trail map for some good practice with navigating a website. Have each student choose a different species to research, and follow up with oral reports to the class on the special characteristics of each species. Some kangaroos can bound up to 29 feet, 6 feet in the air, at a speed of 30 miles an hour. Have students jump as high and as far as they can, and measure the distances. Create a graph that compares human jumping ability with kangaroo prowess.

“The Emperor’s Nightingale” is a story by Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish author, set in China. In the story, the Emperor of China discovers a nightingale, a bird which sings so beautifully that its song restores the ailing Emperor’s health.  The Emperor of Japan sends a mechanical singing bird to the Emperor of China, and his court prefers the artificial bird to the real bird — until the Emperor of China falls ill again. The nightingale come back, sings the Emperor back to health, and asks the Emperor to keep it secret. When the servants arrive in the morning, they are amazed to find the Emperor well.

There are several online versions of the story:

• The Nightingale, by Hans Christian Andersen
• A simpler version
• Rick Walton’s retelling

There are some excellent picture books of the story as well:

• The Nightingaleby Pikko Vainio
• The Nightingale by Jerry Pinkney out of print, but check your library or buy used — great illustrations)
• The Nightingale by Stephen Mitchell

Once you’ve read the story, choose some of the worksheetsand activities linked below in online resources to make sure students have completely understood the story.

Online resources:

• Hear a simplified version of the story read and illustrated at Speakaboos, along with discussion questions and worksheets.
• Watch parts of the opera at the PBS website.
• Listen to some of Stravinsky’s music for the ballet inspired by the story:

• The Barnum Museum has a PDF of activities to go with their play based on The Nightingale. It includes map work for the continent of Asia and particularly for China.
• The Midland Art Center has a collection of worksheets for their production of “The Emporer and the Nightingale.”
• Rag & Bone theater also has a study guide. It looks at concepts of leadership, as well as the puppets the theater uses.
• Usborne has a worksheet suitable for ESL as well as for elementary students.
• Penguin has a reproducible guide as well, designed to go with The Emperor and the Nightingale (Penguin Young Readers, Level 4).
• Nightingales from the BBC gives excellent background on the birds.

Continue with one or more of the lesson plans below.

Write a poem.

Malvina Reynolds wrote a song based on the story. Have students read the lyrics and discuss how the verses connect with the story. Is Reynolds retelling the story or using the story to make a different point?

Ask students to think about the points that come up in reading and thinking about “The Emperor’s Nightingale.” Divide students into groups and have each group choose a point to write about. Challenge students to write their own verses.

Create a mechanical bird.

The mechanical nightingale was a sort of robot. Use our Robot Lesson Plans to explore the idea of robots further.

In the story, the artificial bird sings only one song, while the real bird sang many, and a fisherman muses that the artificial bird’s song is missing something. Discuss whether there are times when  an artifical version of something is not as good as a real one.

The Emperor likes the fact that the artificial bird can sing the same song over and over without getting tired, and also that the artificial bird was covered with jewels. The real bird said that she would rather stay in the forest, so the arrival of the artificial bird gave her the chance to return to her home. Discuss times when an artificial version of something might be better.

Have students design a mechanical bird (a robot bird?) by drawing or creating a model. Will the students choose to make their bird a golden, jewelled bird?This is, for the Emporer, an advantage to the artificial bird, and the students may agree. Ask students to decorate their birds and label the parts to show how they would work, if the bird were in fact mechanical.

Of course, now it would be very easy to make an artifical singing bird. Just add a recordable sound chip to student models to get the full effect.

Explore Orientalism.

Andersen was Danish, and didn’t visit China or Japan. Why did he choose to set this story in Asia? Many 19th century European artists, including writers, were fascinated by Asia, seeing it as the embodiment of mystery and wonder. Andersen might have chosen China as the setting for his story in order to make it more romantic. The practice of creating works of art emphasizing the mysteriousness of the East came to be known as “Orientalism.”

Older students might find it interesting to study the controversy surrounding Orientalism and whether it is a racist approach to Asia, but younger students might be comfortable with the idea that people enjoy thinking about far away places.

Have students prepare a Venn diagram comparing China and Japan during the 19th century. Try some of these resources:

• BBC photos of China
• Harvard photos of China
• Xianfeng Emperor of China (other emperors of China are also included)
• an essay comparing China and Japan
• Columbia University Asian history resources
• stereoviews of 19th century Japan

19th century China

19th century Japan

Another example students might enjoy is Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, a British light opera from the same time period which has the Emperor of Japan as a character.

Challenge students to illustrate the story as realistically as possible.

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Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. This year, the people of Puerto Rico will vote on whether they’d like to become the 51st state in the Union. It’s a great time to study Puerto Rico! We offer three great lesson plans below.

Online resources:

• Explore Puerto Rico with Google Earth. The link takes you to a site where you can fly around without using Google Earth directly. If you have Google Earth on your classroom computer, use it so you can take advantage of all the features.
• Boriqua Kids has printable worksheets and quizzes on Puerto Rico’s geography, as well as a Fact Sheet that taught us some things.
• Statehood for Puerto Rico: You Decide is a research-based lesson plan from the First Ladies Library.
• The US Mint has a very nice PDF unit on the Puerto Rican quarter that includes a folk tale, geography, and some environmental points. (This is Puerto Rico’s special quarter, part of the America the Beautiful Quarters® Program which we often speak of as “state quarters.” Read “A Quarter for Your Thoughts” from 2005 to get an idea of why Puerto Rico has its own quarter even though it is not a state.)
• Scholastic’s Carnival in Puerto Rico uses graphic organizers to explore Carnival in Puerto Rico and compare it with other countries’ celebrations. Check out our Mardi Gras lesson plans for more information.

Books and such:

• Puerto Rico (Hello U.S.A.)
• Puerto Rico in Pictures
• Shake It, Morena!: And Other Folklore from Puerto Rico
• Juan Bobo Goes to Work: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale is a Foolish Jack story.
• The Golden Flower: A Taino Myth from Puerto Rico
• The Legend of the Hummingbird: A Tale from Puerto Rico
• Puerto Rico isn’t a book, but a clever economics-themed game set in Puerto Rico.
• Putamayo Presents Puerto Rico is a wonderful collection of Puerto Rican music.

Getting to know Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico is a beautiful island and a popular tourist destination. Have students “visit” Puerto Rico with Google Earth, using a travel guide like Lonely Planet Puerto Rico  to learn more about the places they see. This can be pair work, group work, or individual work, depending on the number of computers available. If students are divided into groups, consider giving them specific topics assignments: outdoor fun, food, music, etc. Have each student or group of students create an itinerary for a visit to Puerto Rico.

Get the class together to share what you’ve learned, creating a complete list of interesting information on the board or on Post-It notes. Sort all the points listed into a few categories. Use the categories to organize a brochure describing your class’s Puerto Rico tours. If students have been working individually, have them create their own individual brochures and make a bulletin board with them. Groups can create brochures  too, or the entire class can make one bulletin=board sized brochure describing the perfect trip to the island.

Make brochures with art supplies, or use the templates in Microsoft Word  or Serif PagePlus for some tech practice.

Get ready for the vote

In 2012, the people of Puerto Rico will hold a plebescite, a vote on the government of Puerto Rico. They might choose to become a state, they could choose to become an independent country, or they could decide to remain a territory of the United States. If Puerto Rico chooses to become the 51st state of the U.S., Congress would have to approve their decision. Have students research and determine the best plan for Puerto Rico and the United States.

The Puerto Rico Report has extensive coverage and documentation on the issue, from simple statements for upper elementary students to government documents for high school students. Start on the home page and travel in as far as your class’s reading levels will allow. Use the ballot on the homepage to recreate the plebescite in your classroom, giving students a chance to vote on the questions:

Next, use the results in your classroom to determine the next step. If your class has chosen statehood, take on the role of Congress and decide whether or not to accept this on behalf of the American people. If your class chooses independence, decide whether to continue supporting Puerto Rico, and in what way (students might choose to research the history of the Philippines, a former U.S. territory which is now an independent nation). Even if Puerto Rico chooses the Sovereign Commonwealth option, Congress will have to choose whether to accept the terms or not — in previous plebescites, Congress has rejected the definition as unconstitutional.

Form committees to explore the various ramifications of the decision and report back to the class.

Folklore of Puerto Rico

Use books from the list above or online sources to find one or more Puerto Rican folktales to study. Have students use the folktale to create a play or readers theater and present it to a neighboring class or create a video for the class to enjoy.

Mars is our neighbor in space, and it has thrilled Earthlings for centuries. We offer three great lesson plans for getting to know this neighbor.

Online resources:

• Look at Mars. This is a project of Google Sky, and you should look at it if nothing else.
• NASA’s Mars page
• NASA’s Mars Rover page
• Interactive Mars habitat
• Basic facts on Mars (there are some ads and no printable version, but it’s good background).
• Earth Sky explains why Mars looks brighter at some times than at others. Right now is a great time to look for Mars! Have students look for Mars as homework and write a description of what they see.
• Astronomy for Kids Mars page
• Look at a Martian dust devil.
• A PDF activity about Mars focuses on the search for water on Mars.
• Scholastic offers an article on how to dress for a trip to Mars.

Books:

• DK Eyewitness Books: Mars
• Cars on Mars: Roving the Red Planet
• You Are the First Kid on Mars
• The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity (Scientists in the Field Series) (forthcoming) The inspiring story of the Mars Rover.
• The Adventures of Sojourner : The Mission to Mars That Thrilled the World
• The Hubble Space Telescope 
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for some great retro Mars fantasy
• Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars  and Freddy and the Men from Mars  are more great stories from the days when people expected to meet Martians fairly soon — the whole Freddy the Pig series is a read-aloud hit with younger students.

Friendly Martians

As this 1924 U.S. Navy telegram offering to listen for expected radio communication from Mars shows, there was a time in the 20th century when people generally believed that there were sentient beings living on Mars. A 19th century astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, wrote about the “canali” he saw on the surface of Mars. He thought he was seeing channels of water, but some people misinterpreted his Italian word to mean “canals.” This set off a storm of discussion of whether Mars might be inhabited. Schiaparelli wrote of the channels,

Their singular aspect, and their being drawn with absolute geometrical precision, as if they were the work of rule or compass, has led some to see in them the work of intelligent beings… I am very careful not to combat this supposition, which includes nothing impossible.

An American amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, drew detailed maps of Mars with canals and apparent cities. Artists began to draw Martian cities with spiky towers rising from the red land. While most scientists agreed that Mars showed no particular signs of being inhabited, the idea appealed to enough people that there was widespread belief in Martians. Books and movies about Martians became very popular.

On Sunday, October 30, 1938, there was a radio broadcast of Orson Welles’s adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells. Many listeners missed the introduction, and thought that the program was an actual news broadcast of an invasion by Martians.

In 1965, the Mariner expedition dashed the hopes of all those who wanted to get to know Martians by capturing photos of the surface of Mars which, far from having cool cities linked by canals, looked a lot like our moon.

Since then, photos from the Viking expedition and the Hubble telescope have made it clear that any life on Mars must be very small and not up to building cities. And yet, there are still plenty of people writing about and drawing Martians. Check out the Sesame Street Martians, play math games with the Ratio Martians, and then have students imagine their own Martians.

This activity can involve lots of research and a requirement that the Martians be designed to suit the Martian landscape as shown by NASA (see resources above), or it can be an imaginative art project. Either way, have students draw their Martians, labeling the important features of their drawings, and prepare a bulletin board display of the drawings.

Colonizing Mars

Predictions of Martian colonies have been made for many years. 2030 is one of the years given for the first Martian colony. Have your students calculate their ages in 2030 and imagine themselves among the first Martian colonists.

Students should conduct some research for this project. Some of the things they might consider learning about:

• the terrain of Mars
• the atmosphere and resources of Mars
• the temperature on the surface of Mars
• any signs of weather or seasons on Mars
• colonies and their relationships with their mother countries (if colonial politics seems too old-fashioned to be relevant, students might consider the relationships of the United States and territories such as Puerto Rico as an example)
• life on the space shuttle

Use our Science Fiction Genre Study in preparation, prepare a board of facts on Mars to use in the writing, and have students write a week’s worth of journal entries about their experiences as Martian colonists.

Google Mars

Visit Google Mars. Share this video with students first:

Give students time to explore Mars freely. Then have students create a tour of Mars in Google Earth. This activity can readily be combined with either of the others: have students add pictures of their friendly Martians to their tour, or create a tour showing the places they’ve visited in their early days as colonists.

Nursery rhymes have helped babies grasp rhyme and rhythm for centuries, and our students can enjoy them, too. We have three great lesson plans for nursery rhymes, including one for older students.

Lessons for specific nursery rhymes:

• Eensy Weensy Spider
• The House that Jack Built
• Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater
• Three Little Kittens

Jazz Chants

Carolyn Graham popularized jazz chants for ESL classes back in the 20th century, but a variant is great for a study of nursery rhymes no matter what your students’ native languages may be. Not only is this a fun way to learn some rhymes, it’s also good for concentration, cooperation, listening skills, and rhythm. A basic method:

• Divide up your rhyme into separate lines. So, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” is one line and “How does your garden grow?” is another.
• Divide the class into groups and give each group a line to say.
• Help each group learn and practice their line till they can say it rhythmically together when you point to them.
• Conduct the class in a chant by pointing to each group in turn.

Begin by having the students say the rhyme in order, with the “Mary, Mary quite contrary” group first, then the “How does your garden grow?” group, moving on to the remaining lines. Then begin to mix it up, pointing to the groups in different orders. If your students are old enough, let them take turns as conductor. You can make a rule that the chant has to rhyme, or that it must have a certain number of lines, or you can add instrumental lines with tambourines, sand blocks, and other instruments.

Rhyming Games

Many nursery rhymes go with singing games. “London Bridge is Falling Down” and “The Farmer in the Dell” are two examples. Have students ask their parents or grandparents for more examples and learn the games. Make a class list and see how many your class can discover.

This is enough of a lesson plan for small children, since just learning the rules of a game and playing it fairly are challenging to kindergartners. In first or second grade, you can begin writing down the rules, perhaps making a Google Doc to share, and older students can make an oral history project of it.

Secret Messages?

It is often said that nursery rhymes have hidden political messages. “Mary, Mary,” for example, is thought to refer to Mary Tudor and “Hey Diddle Diddle” is said to be about the court of Elizabeth I. Not all scholars believe that these explanations are true. Challenge older students to discover the historical stories behind nursery rhymes and then to decide whether the stories were actually connected with the rhymes or not.

Your library may have The Annotated Mother Goose: With an Introduction and Notes, which reports both the historical connections and the sources. For example, this book relates that “Rockabye Baby” has been linked with James Stuart, but also that commentators from the past have reported that people actually did hang their babies in trees, much as we might use a hammock.

You can also find many nursery rhyme stories online with varying amounts of reference and support. Since we can’t be sure of the truth, it’s an interesting critical thinking and research assignment.

You might share with the students a recent example. In 1884, Grover Cleveland was a candidate for President of the United States. There was a suggestion of scandal: specifically, that Cleveland had an illegitimate child. The opposition chanted, “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” When Cleveland won, some of his supporters turned that chant into a little rhyme:

“Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?”
Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”

It’s easy to imagine kids in a few hundred years jumping rope to this, and having no idea what the historical context was. It’s reasonable to imagine that some of our nursery rhymes now came from just such sources, and are in fact connected to old scandals. However, many scholars believe that people took this one step further and made up stories to fit rhymes which were… just rhymes.

These are the works that will stay in their minds and influence their own thinking and writing.

• Poetry for Young People: Maya Angelou
• Poetry for Young People: Carl Sandburg
• Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson
• Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare
• Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes
• Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost
• Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll
• Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost

Now that you have some famous poems to work with, what should you do with them?

Learn something about the poet

We may not need to know who wrote “Five Little Monkeys” in order to enjoy it fully, but knowing something about the great poets, and about their lives and times, adds depth to our understanding of their work. Even when a poet is surprising or atypical for his or her time and place, that can be important information.

Books like Shakespeare for Kids: His Life and Times, 21 Activities let you examine the world of the poet fully, but it doesn’t hurt to turn kids loose and let them do some research. Add the important dates of the poet’s life to your classroom timeline, find his or her home town on the map, and think about what the world was like in that time and place. Also check out the University of Toronto’s Places of Poems and Poets.

Read the poem

Most poetry is intended to be read aloud. Hear more than one reading of each poem, since the nuances may be different, and encourage students to memorize short poems and recite them. Don’t think they can’t, either — kids who can recite whole scenes of movies and all the current commercial jingles can also recite poetry.

Analyze the poem

We don’t recommend telling students “what the author was trying to say.” We believe that the reader and poet together construct the meaning of a poem, and that it’s possible to get different things from a poem. Even if you don’t agree with us, consider giving students the opportunity to do their own thinking and analysis, since these are important skills. Our lesson on “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats includes the kind of open-ended questions that can help students think about what a poem might mean. Our National Poetry Month Lesson Plans  has a simple plan you can use to begin an analysis of any poem.

 Create something with the poem

Have students choose a favorite line or two from a poem and create something with it. There are many possibilities:

• Use a graphics program or art supplies to create a poster. If you use a graphics program, you can then make a Pinterest page with all the posters.

• Write the lines on Shrinkable Plastic and use them to create jewelry.
• Make a large mosaic with bits of paper for your hallway.

When you have benchmarks for studying plants and for technology, save time by combining the two. Here are two ways to use some of our favorite tech tools to learn more about the plant kingdom.

Google Earth

• Plant a baby tree for your class at MyBabyTree and watch it grow — really– in Google Earth. This is an affordable way to get a real sense of connection with the great forests of the earth. The site has an interactive animation with photos showing the life cycle of a tree, three different tropical trees with varying characteristics, and the way you can watch your tree grow over time. Checking in on the class tree from time to time will let you look not only at plant development but also at latitude and longitude and other geography topics, human geography, environmental issues, growth and development in general, biomes, and computer skills.

• Look at plants around the world in Google Earth and compare them with the plants in your community. One excellent starting place is the Valley of Flowers in India. Open the file in Google Earth and you will find yourself in an impressively mountainous area. Click on the photos to see lots of pictures of plant life, and check out the video below for more images from the same location. Follow up by creating your own photo files of the plants around your school or your town. Add them to Google Earth and share them in the Google Earth Community. There is a student section where kids can share and discuss their finds. (Note: if you’ve tried the Google Earth Community before and found it hard to use, check out the new interface — it’s a lot friendlier. )

Spreadsheets

I was shocked, in talking with local high school writing teachers, to learn that Excel was one of their go-to software choices for their writing classes. This was, in fact, one of the experiences that inspired FreshPlans — teachers need to know about all the great free and low-cost software for education, so they won’t have to settle for what came on their computers. If you like Excel, though, and feel that everyone needs to be able to use spreadsheet software, this is a great time to use it. If you don’t have Excel, you can also use Google Docs free spreadsheets or Open Office, also free.

Have students create a spreadsheet for a virtual plant collection. Either have one for the whole class, with each student researching and contributing a few plants, or have each student build his or her own virtual plant collection.

1. Decide the characteristics that should be included on the spreadsheet. Have students look at various sources of information (California Wildflowers is a good example, and the Lazy Gardener’s Guide is a nice example of a spreadsheet) about plants and list the items of information they include. Possibilities might be the common name(s), the Latin name, the color, the size, the uses, where the plant grows, its place or places of origin, the kind of growing conditions it prefers, and the number or location of a collected specimen or photograph.
2. Build the spreadsheet with spaces for the pieces of information you’ve decided to include. At this point, students can practice design and layout of their spreadsheets, considering things like the size of the cell needed for each piece of information.
3. Input the information for all the collected plants.
4. Try out different ways of sorting the data and decide on the one you’ll use when you publish the spreadsheet.
5. Decide how to publish the spreadsheet. Possibilities include keeping it as an ongoing group document to add to in future, printing out the spreadsheets and adding them to a physical plant collection, or including them in a document with photos either on the class computer or in a notebook.

Once students have created their spreadsheets, learn more about how working scientists use the same kinds of skills and procedures the students have experienced. Read about the Field Museum’s plant collections, and how they’re using modern technology to create a database and to make the collections easier to use, while also protecting them. Students are involved in this project, and the article at the link is accessible for high school or middle school students. Check out their searchable databases and discuss how botanists (plant scientists) might use the information they contain.