Carnivorous plants and peatlands activity book for Canadian classrooms

Description

There is a plant growing in Canadian bogs that drowns insects in a tube of rainwater. It is the provincial flower of Newfoundland and Labrador, it grows from the Atlantic to British Columbia — and almost none of your students know it exists.

This book starts with that fascination and takes it somewhere much larger: why some soils are so poor that plants had to learn to hunt, and why peatlands are among the most valuable landscapes in the country.

What’s inside
· 4 illustrated discovery sheets: the five kinds of traps, six species worth knowing, the life of a peatland

· 1 full-page plate on how each trap works, to project or photocopy

· 12 standalone activities: colouring, word search, a three-week experiment, a Mason jar terrarium, an observation journal, creative writing, a structured debate

· Complete answer key
· A Peatland Guardian certificate to hand out at the end of the unit

Every activity lists a suggested age range and a duration. Everything photocopies cleanly in black and white. The illustrations are original botanical plates, drawn for this book.

The moment that lands with students: a peatland grows one millimetre thicker per year. Over one square metre, that works out to exactly one litre. So a 70-litre bag of peat at the garden centre represents 70 years of accumulation. Students do the arithmetic themselves — and never look at the gardening aisle the same way again.

Curriculum is set provincially, so the book maps to outcomes from kindergarten through Grade 8, with extension material for senior Biology.

Single classroom licence.

Photocopy it as often as you need for your students, year after year. School and organization licences available on request.