Special Resource Collections

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Elementary Lessons & Investigations

Recommended Fast Plants teaching and learning resources for elementary grade level learners.
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Middle School Lessons & Investigations

Collection of recommended Fast Plants teaching and learning resources for middle school grade level learners.
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High School Lessons & Investigations

Collection of recommended Fast Plants teaching and learning resources for high school level learners.
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College Resources & Investigations

Collection of recommended resources and investigations for use with AP® and college level teaching and learning.

Growing Fast Plants

Resources with everything you need to know about growing Fast Plants.
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Life Cycle

Collection of resources tied to understanding the super-fast Fast Plants life cycle (14 days to flower under ideal growing conditions!) and life cycles more generally.
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Genetics and Selection Collection

Collection of resources and lessons valuable for designing, conducting, and analyzing results from investigations into genetics and selection (natural and human-directed) with Fast Plants.

News

Growing our understandings about Brassica origins

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Scientists build on the work of the Father of Fast Plants, Paul Williams, and other Brassica researchers.

Using evidence from a wide variety of biological, physical, and cultural sources, ethnobotanists from UW-Madison are giving us new insights into the origins and worldwide diversity of Brassicas. Eve Emshwiller and her former graduate student Alex McAlvay (now a botanist at New York Botanical Gardens) led this research, which was published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Our Wisconsin Fast Plants Program team then worked with Alex McAlvay to update one of our popular teaching resources from the early 1990s, called Around the World with Brassicas, creating a new set of resources that includes:

  • Lesson Plans A complete set of lesson plans and resources for an inquiry that includes a selection experiment with Fast Plants and a strong research component. These lessons were developed with both the BSCS 5E and Gather, Reason, Communicate instructional models and to investigate and explain the variation we see in Brassicas. In addition, these lessons are intentionally designed to support culturally responsive teaching.
  • 10-minute video for use with students This ...

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