Philly Seed Pods – An Online Curriculum About Native Plants

An Online Curriculum about Native Plants

Philly Seed Pods is a Girl Scouts Gold Award Project with the goal of educating the children of Philadelphia and the surrounding area on the role of native plants in our ecosystems, and the importance of bringing them into our cities.

Curriculum

Part 1: What are Native Plants?

This video defines different types of plants and the negative and positive effects that they have on the ecosystem they exist in. It also provides a definition for the term ecosystem. The different types of plants are defined are: native, non-native, invasive, and naturalized.

Part 2: Identifying and Removing Invasive Plants

This video dives deeper into the topic of invasive plants, by discussing three invasive plants in this area. The plants discussed are garlic mustard, invasive honeysuckle, and stilt grass. The video covers how to identify those plants and how the plants can be removed.

Part 3: How Invasive Plants Harm Ecosystems

This video continues the conversation on the three invasive plants identified in the previous video, which are garlic mustard, invasive honeysuckle, and stilt grass. This video explains how these plants originally came to our ecosystem and the harm that they do to it.

Part 4: Five Native Plants and How to Identify Them

This video discusses native plants in our ecosystem, and how we can identify them. The native plants identified are sunflowers, wild violets, native honeysuckle, asters, and goldenrod.

Part 5: How Native Plants Help the Ecosystem

Part 5: How Native Plants Help the Ecosystem This video continues the conversation about the five native plants identified in

Part 6: How to Plant and Care for Native Plants

This is the final video of the curriculum, and it explains how you can use the knowledge learned from the previous videos to protect native plants or even grow your own native plants, either in pots or in garden beds.

Downloads: Coloring Page 1 | Coloring Page 2

About Mia

Mia Hoppel, an incoming freshman at Rosemont College, is a Philadelphia resident and native plant enthusiast.

She has crafted this online curriculum as a part of her Gold Award Project, which also featured in-person native plant presentations and a native planting activity.

The Gold Award is the highest award available in Girl Scouts and is awarded to scouts who have completed an 80-hour project that focused on making the world a better place.

Making the world a better place is not only a large task, it also has very broad parameters, which allows individual scouts to focus on an issue of their choosing, and craft a project to meet the challenge of that issue.

For Mia, that issue is the impact of urban centers on biodiversity, and the way to tackle that issue is native plants. Change always starts with children, and if children can learn about the important role native plants play in the fight against climate disasters, real change can start to happen now.

Mia Hoppel’s passion for native plant life has fueled this project, and that passion was born at a young age in the garden and pursued further throughout volunteer projects and professional work in native plant gardens.

She hopes to share that passion with the next generation, and create a better future in the process.