Teachers are invited to join Dr.Rob Wiltshire, PooFlip creator and Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania’s Biological Sciences for a workshop to unpack the PooFlip and revisit the Flip family: EucaFlip, TreeFlip and FungiFlip.
The latest in the series of Flip resources for schools is PooFlip enabling your students to identify the Tasmanian native mammals in your area. Most of our native mammals are active at night, but you can use their ‘calling cards’ (scats) to identify them. PooFlip is a life-size photographic guide to the scats of Tasmanian native mammals featuring Jane Burrell’s beautiful illustrations of the 28 terrestrial native mammals.
Over the past decade more than half of Tasmanian schools have been supplied with free class sets of flips (literally thousands of flips) and if your school would like to receive a class set of PooFlip and/or needs to be re-stocked with one or more of the class sets of Flips, all you need to do is to send an email requesting which flips you would find useful, to: SNS.Admin@utas.edu.au. We’ll ship them out to you. Free of charge.
The different Flips support a wide range of learning activities that all tie in to the learning objectives in the science curriculum and can be used at any level from K-third year University (maybe even honours).
EucaFlip is especially valuable for introducing the concepts of keys to identify a species, subtle variation that is important in recognising different species, and different stages of development in both transitions from juvenile to adult leaves, from buds to flowers to seed capsules.
TreeFlip introduces students to the concept of classification at higher levels of family, along with some of the important characters that help distinguish those families.
FungiFlip is really just a shock awakener to the incredible diversity of other life forms that usually go unnoticed. 300 plus species of fungi are illustrated but these are just the more common species and more than twice as many have been identified in Tasmania.
PooFlip will inform students of the range of Tasmanian mammals – many of which they will never have heard of – their distinguishing characteristics, distributions, habitats and diets.
But all four Flips will open students eyes to the variety of life that surrounds them in the natural environment.