Author: Tina Michetti
Origin:BELGIUM (French community)
Implemented in: Portugal, Slovenia, Czech Republic and Austria
The main aim of this GP is to learn about plants and their leaves and to be able to compare them. This GP is very nature-based and its implementation does not require complicated materials or tools, but rather field trips. It encourages the students to go outside and carefully look at trees, their leaves and fruits, to touch them and collect some samples. Students are made aware of the plants’ life cycle and needs; they learn to pay more attention to nature around them and to be more observant.
Success stories
In general this GP was very well received by all the implementers, as their feedback was overall positive. For instance, one of the Portuguese teachers mentioned that even though, or maybe especially because the GP is quite simple and asks the students to study the leaves of the trees in their surroundings, they were very motivated by it and learned to pay more attention to nature. According to this teacher, this GP is “important to alert students to the problems of the preservation of ecosystems”. He says that “Portugal has serious problems with forest fires and these activities may be important for community awareness.” The Slovenian teacher had a similar impression to the Portuguese one.
Remarkably, all the teachers mentioned that the students had some very interesting findings at the end of their own observations. Most students had different ways of noting down their observations; some students were taking photos regularly and at the end they had good documentation on the life cycle of the plants that they observed, whereas other students wrote down notes on the evolution of the plants in various forms such as diary format.
According to most of the teachers, the success of this GP lies in its simple hands-on method and its basic but very important topic. Students enjoyed being given the freedom to use their creativity and resources in order to record the life cycle of plants. The success of this GP can be seen by the example of one of the Portuguese teachers who said that the topic “leaves of plants” is not foreseen in the national curricula, but due to its importance in raising awareness with the students, and seeing how the students enjoyed the observations of nature, the school will introduce this topic to their biology curriculum and they will continue using this GP in the future.