Help with studies of flowering plant families June 01 2017, 1 Comment
For many years, I have promoted the idea of structuring botany around the flowering plant families. It’s a practical way of addressing the diversity of the angiosperms, and it is knowledge that works in many places and at many levels. For instance, organic gardeners need to know the families of vegetables so that they can do the proper crop rotation and fertilizing. Plant identification is much easier if one can determine the family. Flowers in the same family share certain features, so it is quite possible to recognize the family even if you have never seen that species before.
To help you with your botany studies, I’ve just revised and expanded my PowerPoint slides on flowering plant families. This file is a pdf that can be printed to make letter-sized posters of 20 flowering plant families. The slides include text that describes the features of the flowers, and they show photos of family members. To round out this material, I’ve added a representative photo of 48 other families or subfamilies from all branches of the angiosperms.
Perhaps you would like to do a Tree of Life diagram for the flowering plants. There is a good one in the book, Botanicum by Katie Scott and Kathy Willis. It is part of the Welcome to the Museum series from Big Picture Press (no relation to Big Picture Science), and it was published in 2016. The branches are correct on the diagram (pages 2 and 3), but they have just one example for each branch, and the orders are not stated. The example represents a whole order, which leaves out a lot. For example, the rose order, Rosales, is represented by a mulberry leaf. Mulberries and figs belong to family Moraceae, which is in the rose order, along with rose, elm, buckthorn, hemp, and nettle families. On the other hand, the diagram fits on two pages. It have to be much larger to be more comprehensive. All-in-all, the book is delightful and will provide lots of fun browsing. You will have to tell children that the page on fungi is a holdover from earlier definitions of botany.
The photos of families from my newly revised Flowering Plant Families Slides can be used to create a Tree of Life that has many orders. It gives a broader look at the families than its predecessor, and it is still centered on the families of North America. There are over 400 families of angiosperms worldwide. You don’t need to worry about being anywhere near comprehensive when you introduce children to flower families. Select the main ones for which you have examples from your school landscape, in areas near the school, or as cut flowers. If you or your children want to see the full list, go to the Wikipedia article on APG IV system (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group IV).
I’m not the only one that advocates structuring botany studies around flowering plant families. Thomas Elpel has written a highly successful book called Botany in a Day: The Pattern Method of Plant Identification. It is further described as “An Herbal Field Guide to Plant Families of North America.” This book is in its sixth edition. It has color drawings as well as black and white ones, and these could be useful in classrooms. I have not recommended placing this book in the elementary classroom, however, because it includes many food and medicinal uses for wild plants. I do not want to encourage children to eat wild plants or use them as medicine.
Botany in a Day is available from Mountain Press Publishing in Missoula, Montana, which also carries Elpel’s flower family book for children, Shanleya’s Quest. This book is a great one for elementary classrooms, and I strongly recommend it.
Enjoy exploring and identifying the flowers!
My botany photo cards set 1, Major Branches of the Plant Kingdom, is a good way to launch studies of the diversity of plants. While I would hope that you can have many of the branches of the plant kingdom represented in classroom houseplants, you are not likely to have many reproductive structures or the rarer plants available. The photos allow children to see structures and plants that you can’t otherwise provide.
Photo card set 2, Flowering Plant Families, is an introduction to 14 flowering plant families. The photos each have text on the back to start children’s research about these lineages. The families are a sampling across the major lineages of angiosperms. The efile of my PowerPoint presentation on flowering plant families, designed first for adult botany education, is available as a download. This pdf shows 20 families, eleven of which are not in photo card set 2. The PowerPoint slides are illustrated with color photos, and the pdf is at sufficient resolution for printing. Purchasers have the right to print the slides, but only for their own classroom. The slides can serve as research starters, although the photo cards have more information, and the text is in complete sentences vs. the phrases on the slides.
Photo card set 3, 48 Flowers for Study and Sorting, can be used with many levels of students. This set has examples of a wide variety of flower features, and includes a table to help teachers pick the right cards for a variety of lessons, from simple naming of flowers to details of their structure. While younger children will likely be sorting the pictures, upper elementary and secondary students can use the accompanying text cards to learn more about the structural details and the lineages of the plants. For example, the photo that symbolizes this set is a flower of blue flax. It is a eudicot flower with distinct petals that shows radial symmetry. The text card tells that this plant is a member of the rosid lineage of eudicots, and of the fabid lineage of rosids. Its order and family are also given.