Montana Sewell and recent Rolex finalist, Zander Srodes, have created this wonderful activity book on freshwater turtles. You can download for educational or personal use from here: Freshwater Turtle Adventure Activity Book (PDF)
As part of the Alonso-Stepanova lab at NCSU, there is a website that includes experiments for elementary school kids:
For many centuries, people have been fascinated with plants and wanted to learn more about them. People have been growing plants (mainly for food) for many thousands of years. Not only do plants give us food and plain look nice, but they also provide building materials (wood, for example), clothes (cotton T-shirts), furniture (wooden tables), toys (blocks) and a lot more.
To study plants, people not only grew them, but also did a lot of experiments, learning many interesting things about plants along the way. Experiments are a fun way to look for an answer to a question or to test an idea. Are experiments only for adults? Not at all! Kids like you have a lot of questions (don’t we all?) and you may be surprised to find out that you are more than able to answer many of the questions by yourself or together with friends and parents! The experiments described in this website/brochure can help you design and perform real experiments. They will help you learn about how plants grow. And the best thing about these experiments is that they are practically free.
One of the few whole-tree herbivory estimates was conducted in Walcha, New South Wales, Australia with Earthwatch volunteers in 1985. Over 100,000 leaves were measured for length, width, leaf area, and insect damage. Over 20 Earthwatch volunteers gave their time and energy to this survey, which was critical in solving the eucaylpt dieback syndrome that devastated Australia in the mid-eighties (of note: now we recognize those drought and weather-related insect outbreaks as part of a climate change syndrome). This powerpoint, created by New College student Erik Walimaa, summarizes some of this data on whole tree herbivory.
Here is a PDF poster/printout of the Art of Exploration featuring Meg’s Lowman’s exploration of the rainforest canopy and more. It was created by The Kennedy Center Imagination Celebration Fort Worth.
