Welcome to the Teachers Area
The Great Plant Hunt develops children's understanding of the natural world and is an ideal free resource to help you teach the primary science curriculum.
Introducing the Great Plant Hunt
Below are the main teaching resources for all primary year groups (ages 5-11). The relevant year group tabs above contain versions particular to your year group - plus some fun extras!
- The Great Plant Hunt at a glance Word
-
TGPH Teachers Handbook
PDF
Word
(Packed with activity ideas and lesson plans for each year group, with curriculum links and supporting materials)
-
The Great Plant Hunt Identikit
PDF
(Helps to identify common UK plants)
- Following in Darwin's footsteps storybook PDF
- Great Plant Hunt Videos
The films are a great way to get a feel for The Great Plant Hunt. Find videos from plant hunters across the world on each year group page - why not show one in an assembly?
- The Great Plant Hunt intro video Video
- The Great Plant Hunt intro video download .wmv(50 MB) .mov(52 MB)
- The Great Plant Hunt celebratory video Video
- The Great Plant Hunt celebratory video download .wmv(43 MB) .mov(45 MB)
- TGPH as a whole school project PDF Word
- Health and safety information PDF
Curriculum connections
What's this?
BiodiversityTeachers need to sign up for a school account - even if you've already registered to get our newsletter.
When you sign up, we'll send you a username and password for your classes to log in with and share photos and data from their Great Plant Hunt activities.
Please use a school email address if you have one - other email addresses will take a little longer to process.
You must log in to:
- Change your details or year group
- Send us your photos
- Moderate photos
- Send in tips and tricks
- Assign teachers to year groups
New visitor? Register here
Photos
Every week, we'll award one stunning image the prestigious 'Photo of the Week' grand title! Winning photos will appear on The Great Plant Hunt home page in the treehouses and in the photo album.
Send us your photos!Sign up for an account to get your school's children uploading photos and entering the competition.
Tips and Tricks
Fun with leaves
What we enjoyed this year was collecting the leaves gathered on a thinking walk, pressing them in the plant press and using them to make christmas cards! We might experiment with biodegradable festive decorations next year..
Thinking walk identification
A great thing to do when you have identified a plant from the identikit is to photograph it with that page of the identikit! That way you will still know what it is when you look through your pictures.
Posters aplenty
The poster in the Treasure Chest is just the start. Download and print out as many footsteps as you need to walk the childrens’ work all over school.
More tips & tricksTeaching resources and learning games
About these materials
The Great Plant Hunt teaching resources support three plant science activities over five or six lessons for each primary year group across all UK national curricula.
They use familiar teaching processes and concepts - specialist training and support is not needed. Lots more resources can be found on the year group pages.
Teaching resources
The fun stuff - play online
These engaging educational interactive challenges for all age ranges can be used by children independently or on a whiteboard as a whole class activity.
- Sunflower Survival
- Habitat Challenge
- Plant Puzzle
- Plant or not game
- Herby Havoc
All about assemblies
Planning assemblies
Plan and run up to eight weeks' worth of Great Plant Hunt assemblies.
Start each one with a reading from the storybook about the life and work of Charles Darwin. Use the postcard and video resources to introduce real life Plant Hunters whose messages will help kick-start the classroom work. And don't forget to look in the resource bank for more presentation material to illustrate assembly themes in greater depth.
Quick start assembly downloads
More for assemblies
Acknowledge good work by awarding a special Great Plant Hunt certificate of achievement. There is one design for each year group in both colour and black/white:
- Collectors colour certificate PDF
- Collectors black and white certificate PDF
- Discoverers colour certificate PDF
- Discoverers black and white certificate PDF
- Investors colour certificate PDF
- Investors black and white certificate PDF
- Lookouts colour certificate PDF
- Lookouts black and white certificate PDF
- Plant Detectives colour certificate PDF
- Plant Detectives black and white certificate PDF
- Thinkers colour certificate PDF
- Thinkers black and white certificate PDF
The children's best work can be celebrated and displayed on the poster from the Treasure Chest or these downloadable versions:
Get these extra footsteps walking all the way around the classroom (or even the school!) and celebrate children's work with some gorgeous stickers:
- Footsteps cutouts - A3 PDF
- Footsteps cutouts - A4 PDF
- Year names to cut out PDF
- Stickers for each year group PDF
Print out a free poster of Darwin as a young man. There's also more info about his life and work to go with the storybook:
- Charles Darwin poster - A3 PDF
- Charles Darwin poster - A4 PDF
- Charles Darwin and his Thinking Walks Word
Teach your school a song to celebrate Darwin with this easy-peasy teaching video, lyrics and other useful stuff from Singtastic.com's Darwin oratorio:
Map
As soon as your school is registered, children will be able to find it on
The Great Plant Hunt school map. The fruiting daisy map shows where Darwin's Investigators have found fruiting daisies and later on in the spring, The Great Plant Hunt Biodiversity Week map will show where Biodiversity Week plants have been spotted.
Sunflower barcharts
Share and compare the Investigator year's germination data with schools across the country! Enter sunflower seed germination times that your school recorded in their experiments and then see how this compares to other schools.
Thinking Walks
You are invited to follow in Darwin's footsteps with our Darwin-inspired Thinking Walks. Complementing The Great Plant Hunt, Thinking Walks offer families, friends and outdoor organisations a change to get involved with the project too.
Find out more about what these walks are, where they are taking place and how you can get involved. Whether you are a family looking for a great day out or an organisation with outside space - Thinking Walks are for you!
Find out more at www.kew.org/thinking-walks
Make your own Treasure Chest and resources!
All teaching materials and resources are available to download - so you can make your own Treasure Chest of resources to run The Great Plant Hunt completely free. Independent schools are also invited to apply for school accounts. To "do-it-yourself", use the links below to print out all the booklets, print and make your own box, make a plant press and put together or buy a mini seed bank.
- Make your own Treasure Chest PDF
- TGPH Teachers Handbook Word
- Following in Darwin's footsteps storybook PDF
- The Great Plant Hunt Identikit PDF
- Teachers' Species Guide PDF
- Make a plant press PDF Word
- About the mini seed bank PDF Word
Or you can buy the storybook or mini seed bank from Kew's online shop.