What a great activity! As so many others have said, it inspired me to finally make the plant presses I’ve been wanting to for years. Naturally, they were not ready in time (the shellac is still tacky and drying… maybe it’s too old?) and I had to improvise. The biggest challenge was the lupine taproot. No way was that thing going to flatten out for me and I didn’t want to cut it.
Overall, I’m happy with the final products. I look forward to students pressing plants around the school and ones collected on field trips. We can build up our own mini-herbarium!
So glad you like the activity! It is a lot of fun, and you can build up a nice little collection of plants from around the school, or when you go on a field trip and you can add to it each year. If it becomes to bulky you can also make it into a photographic collection and add new ‘pages’ in the form of new plants to each of the ‘books’. The Plants of my School, or the plants of Chena Lakes Recreation Area, etc. It will be a great adventure for students to find those plants students from the previous year found, and adding new ones. You can always look at our database https://arctos.database.museum/ for additional potential plants that might be in your area…
Thank you for the great ideas! I am always looking and thinking about how to incorporate different methods to document our findings not just for one class of students, but for future classes as well.