Living things and life cycles
What living things need, how they grow and change, and how they fit their habitats.
Lessons
Plants and Seeds: What Does a Seed Need?
What's hiding inside a bean, and what does it need to wake up and grow? Young scientists open soaked seeds, sprout beans in bags and watch seedlings bend to find the light.
Cells: The Smallest Living Things
How small is a cell, how does water get in, what's inside, and why are cells so tiny? Four lessons with potatoes, strawberries and gelatin that work with a microscope or without one.
Who Lives Here?
A schoolyard survey with string squares and hand lenses, sorting animals by their features, life cycles from caterpillar to butterfly, and who can live in which habitat. Students look, count and sketch but never collect or harm. Works in any climate and any country, in a garden, on pavement or in a desert.
Flowers, Fruit and Seeds: How Plants Make More Plants
What is a flower really for? Is a tomato a fruit? How can a seed travel without legs? Three hands-on lessons on pollination, fruits and seeds, and seed dispersal, from a flower you can take apart, through foods you can cut open, to seed models you can drop, blow and float. Nothing is tasted, and it works in any climate.
How Plants Make Food: Photosynthesis and Respiration
Where does a tree's mass come from, what happens to the sugar a plant makes, and how does the Sun's energy run a whole ecosystem? Three no-materials lessons with a 400-year-old willow experiment, printed atom cards and a carbon-atom role-play.
Natural Selection: How Living Things Change Over Time
A peppered moth hunting game over four generations, the Grants' real Galápagos finch data from the 1977 drought, whale fossils in rock-layer order with a forelimb bone comparison, and five case stations on selective breeding and antibiotic resistance. Every lesson runs on printed sheets alone: no materials to buy.
Genes and Traits: Heredity and Punnett Squares
Why you look like your family but not exactly, how two purple-flowered pea plants can have a white-flowered one, what Gregor Mendel really counted, and what happens when a gene changes. Four no-materials lessons with printed allele cards, Punnett squares, Mendel's own data and a real gene to decode.
Like Parent, Like Baby? Traits and Families
Why does a grey cygnet grow into a white swan, why are puppies in one litter different colours, and why does a bean plant grown in the dark come up tall and yellow? Three lessons with nothing to buy: students match drawn family cards, make a living bar graph of pea cards beside Gregor Mendel's real counts, and walk a case-file trail of plants and animals changed by where they live.
Survival Clues: Fossils, Groups and Changing Habitats
Four no-materials lessons on what helps living things survive: reading fossil cards from Antarctica to the Himalaya to work out what places were like long ago, a predator-and-prey game on why animals live in groups, a camouflage hunt on printed bark and sand, and case files on what happens when a habitat changes. Everything runs on printed sheets.