Culturally and Economically Important Nontimber Forest Products of Northern Maine

Curriculum Materials

The complex connections between people and plants in northern Maine offer many opportunities for engaging students across the disciplines of Social Studies, Geography, History, Economics, Nutrition and Home Economics, and Biology and Life Science. Our curriculum resources were designed and tested by educators.

Guide to Lessons

Please click on the links under each lesson description to view and download PDF files. Most lessons and units are available for grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. All lessons are mapped to the Maine Learning Results standards.

 

Diverse Economies

Discipline: Social Studies, Economics

In this lesson, students learn about the ways people put together livelihoods in the informal economy, using strategies such as barter, self-provisioning, and gifting to meet their needs. Activities include analysis of stories and case studies, and student logs of alternative economic interactions.

• Lesson K-4
• Lesson 5-8
• Lesson 9-12

 

Eating in Season

Discipline: Social Studies, Geography, Local & Regional History

In this lesson, students explore the yearly cycle of gathering through the seasonal round diagram. They make seasonal round diagrams after reading about gatherers in northern Maine. Elementary and middle school students interview community members to create local seasonal round diagrams, while older students analyze climatic and geographic differences in seasonal round diagrams from different places.

• Unit 2-4
• Unit 5-8
• Lesson 9-12

 

Wild Nutrition

Discipline: Health and Home Economics, Biology; Extensions for Chemistry, Mathematics

Students identify wild foods that could substitute for ingredients in common recipes. They analyze the nutritional content of wild foods and compare it with that of the conventional ingredients. Extensions include mathematical analysis of nutritional content and chemistry lab experiments for finding nutrient content of foods.

• Lesson K-4
• Unit 5-8
• Unit 9-12

 

Wild Plants, Gathering, & Sustainability

Discipline: Biology, Ecology

In this four-lesson mini unit, students become experts on the culturally and economically important plants profiled on this website, and then consider the ways that human actions including gathering affect different levels of ecological scale, from organism to ecoregion. After analyzing multiple examples of human gathering in different landscapes, students craft policy recommendations for a hypothetical landowner.

• Unit 9-12

 

Curriculum documents on this page are in PDF format. You may obtain a free PDF reader from Adobe.