Mapping flowers and food

1. Ask learners to work in small groups (three or four works well) and give each group a Who eats what? Worksheet.
2. Give the group five minutes to read the list of plants and encourage them to discuss and circle which are grown as food for people. Emphasise that food grown for people often serves as food for nature as well. Remind learners that there is no right or wrong answer, but they must listen carefully to each other to come to a consensus.
3. Facilitate a discussion comparing answers with the provided answer sheet and encourage exploration of any differences in answers among the groups.   
4. After completing the activity, head to an area of flowers or food growing – where plants have been intentionally planted as opposed to growing wild. Depending on how much support learners need, if you have multiple areas of this habitat you may wish to ask each group to investigate a different area – this will help you to map multiple areas in one session.
5. Each group can use the Flowers and food habitat flowchart, answering each question to reach a decision on which habitat they have. Repeat this for each area of flowers or food on your site, until you have identified them all.  
6. If using a printed map of your site: ask learners to draw and label the habitat they have just identified on the map. If using the Habitat Mapper tool on a mobile device: educators and learners can work together to accurately draw the habitat on the map.  
7. If you used a printed map, remember to add the habitats identified to the Nature Park map using the Habitat Mapper tool when you are back in the classroom. This is a really important step to ensure your site and your observations contribute to real-world, groundbreaking research by the Natural History Museum into nature recovery. 

Open Habitat Mapper tool

Reflection

Ask learners to consider how they know whether these plants were intentionally planted by people or if they are wild, growing on their own. Guide the conversation toward understanding the varying needs of different plants. Ask learners to think about how much help each type of plant might require from people to grow successfully. If there are plants that were not planted, encourage learners to think creatively about how these plants might have ended up in their discovery spot.