Any observations about how the students experienced the CP's?
I do have several stories about the CPs that the teachers told me and some that I saw first hand. There were always a lot of questions to be answered whenever I went to the classrooms to service the plants.
In one of the classrooms, the teacher told me that he spied a couple of shy students working together near the plants trying to identify the plants in one of the reference books that I had left with the display. Once they had found a picture that looked similar to the plant in the display, the teacher overheard them trying to pronounce the Latin name of the plant. These students were in sixth grade. The same class also had many questions for me about the origins of these plants and about why these plants developed the trait to be carnivorous.
In another school, the students were in fourth grade, the teacher had a trouble making student that was assigned a permanent seat at the front of the class to keep him focused on his school work. The teacher noticed the student's interest in the carnivorous plants and asked the student to have the subject of his next writing assignment be the plants. The teacher was finally able to get the student to write by using the carnivorous plants. This eventually progressed to the student writing a letter to the author of
The Savage Garden when the class practiced writing a standard letter. The student got a prompt response within two weeks from the author and was very thrilled. I can only hope he becomes another CP enthusiast.
One school incorporated the plants into their microscope unit by having the students dissects the plants and look at them under the microscopes. They dissected the plants to look at the flowers and the glands of the plant. Pretty much anything they could take apart and look at they dissected. They did this mostly with Sarracenia and Utricularia traps.
Another teacher had the students practice recording long term observations about the plants in a scientific fashion. This was similar to the other teacher's idea of having the students use the plants in their writing unit by writing journals and letters about the plants.