Welcome to the Science and Plants for Schools newsletter – and a special welcome to the many, many trainee teachers who’ve been joining our SAPS Associates scheme over the past few weeks.

We’ve got resources, news, ideas and opportunities for you and your students. So lets get straight to it…

New GCSE resource – cloning cauliflowers

Having trouble with mouldy cauliflowers? The Cauliflower Cloning practical, very popular at GCSE, is great fun for your students – until the cauliflowers sprout mould rather than leaves. Luckily, SAPS’ Dan Jenkins is a dab hand at micropropagation, having worked in the orchid lab at RBG Kew. We’ve created a new illustrated worksheet, student’s notes and technical guide for your classroom, based on an original protocol developed at Kew to rescue endangered plants around the world. We hope that these will help you identify and overcome some of the problems that you might have had in the past. Don’t forget that, as a SAPS Associate, you can use our Ask the Experts service for any practicals you’re having difficulty with.

http://bit.ly/vUUUx2

ASE Annual Conference – lectures and practicals to inspire your teaching 

We’re looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible at the ASE Annual conference, taking place at the University of Liverpool, from 4th – 7th January 2012. The SAPS team will be offering advice and inspiration from the Biology stand in the exhibition marquee , bringing together 10 different biology organisations, with live demos on the stand all day, and plenty of free resources to give away.

The popular ‘Biology in the Real World’ lecture series will be celebrating its 10th year, with a whole day of lectures on the theme of ‘Competition’ on Friday 6th January. Dr Jeremy Pritchard will get you thinking about pressure, cells, plants and competition in a whole new way, with a lively lecture including videos and hands-on demos. Bring a data stick to take away video clips for your classroom.
 
If you’re looking for inspiration and trouble-shooting with your practicals, join us for the ‘Biology in the Real World’ practical drop-in session on Thursday 5th January. SAPS has paired up with other organisations including SGM and CLEAPSS to put on an extravaganza of practical biology, chemistry and physics, all in one lab. Whether you stay for 10 minutes or 2 hours, you’re sure to come away with something to improve your teaching. Judging from last year, get there early to avoid the crowds.

It’s free to visit the exhibition marquee, so if you’re feeling broke, you can still come and get lots of great stuff. What’s more, trainee teachers can attend 1 day of the conference free if they buy a year’s ASE membership (£34) – highly recommended by the trainees we met last year. Find out more about the conference and buying tickets here: http://bit.ly/e0Wpjy

SAPS Associate Awards – grants of up to £500 awarded to teachers, technician and HLTA

In last term’s newsletter, we advertised our SAPS Associate Awards, grants of up to £500 to enable you to develop new classroom resources. We had a fabulous response from both teachers and technicians, with a huge range of ideas for new practicals, investigations and more. Our Associates will be getting busy shortly, so watch out for new resources on topics including extracting plant oils to demonstrate saturation levels, investigating the physics of plants, investigations into phytoremediation and using plants to reclaim land flooded by sea water, a "supermarket science" resource demonstrating succession in the classroom, a project investigating Gratzel cells and photosynthesis, and careers resources for science teachers. A new round of Associate Awards will be advertised next term, so get thinking about your ideas.    

Resources – links to A-level specifications updated

For those of you teaching AS and A2 Biology, we’ve now listed the key SAPS resources recommended for the AQA, Edexcel and OCR specifications. These are all available from the Specifications page:

http://bit.ly/ltV6Of

Resource - video from RBG Kew

Here’s a wonderful video showing how Sparmannia flowers respond to touch. When insects land on the flowers, their red and yellow pollen-bearing parts open out, a great example of thigmonastic movement that you may not have seen before.

http://on.fb.me/rNdIEd

Get your students’ experiment into space

Your students’ experiment, 250 miles above earth, for the whole world to see. What will they do?

YouTube Space Lab have called on Professor Stephen Hawking to help them find the best and brightest young space scientists, aged 14-18. And that could be your own biology students! All they need to do is to design an experiment that could be carried out in space, create a two minute video explaining it and upload it to YouTube. The winning experiments will be carried out in the International Space Station 250 miles above earth. The deadline for entries is 7th December 2011. Find out more: http://bit.ly/unlcZ5

If you’re looking for inspiration, why not find out more about the research that Japanese astronauts are doing with cucumbers here: http://bit.ly/w1wg42

News - What does a robot Venus Fly Trap eat?

It’s been a busy month for biomimicry of plants. First of all, there came the news that the slippery rims of Nepenthes (pitcher plants) had inspired a surface that repelled everything that could be thrown at it. http://bit.ly/sCr1KC

And now, not one but two teams of University researchers, in South Korea and the USA, have been working on creating robot Venus Fly Traps that mimic the plant’s ability to detect movement and snap shut to capture their prey. They’ve learnt from the plant’s survival strategy, and are creating robots that might be able to ‘feed’ themselves in difficult situations: http://bit.ly/vxulJi

Find us on Facebook, or trend us on Twitter

If a newsletter every half-term isn’t enough to keep you up to date with the latest in plant science, plant biology teaching, and anything else that’s planty that we find, then come and find us on Facebook. We’ve got daily updates from the SAPS team, with something fabulous (or at least moderately interesting) every day: http://on.fb.me/rRDIGq

If Twitter’s your social network of choice, you can find us on Twitter too:  https://twitter.com/#!/SAPS_News Twitter’s a great tool for science teachers, with not only thousands of scientists tweeting live from their labs, but great education chats every Monday (via hashtag #ASEchat) and Thursday (via hashtag #ukedchat)

Best wishes

The Administratort, Dan Jenkins, Elisabeth Burmeister and Ginny Page
The Science and Plants for Schools team