Sutton's Hidden Worlds - Biology  

We hope that you enjoy looking over the resources that we have prepared for your class. We would like to thank our colleagues in the London Borough of Sutton, including from the Sutton Ecology Centre and SEND experts from primary schools across the Borough, for their time and excellent advice during the planning of this project. London provides a home to over 14,000 different species of plants, animals and fungi. This amazing range of life and the natural habitats they live in is called biodiversity. Within Sutton there are many habitats including chalk grasslands, woodlands, rivers and wetlands, and parks and other green spaces. There are also many urban habitats within this area. In these lesson plans, we will explore some of the living things that call Sutton home, how they make their homes, and what makes them able to live there.

The overarching theme of the Sutton’s Hidden Worlds project, and one that we have tried to emphasise, is how interconnected the many parts of biology are. Our local environment provides habitats for many different species and all those species, including humans, rely on each other for various parts of life. This includes many organisms that are not visible to the naked eye, including those found in soils and water. To aid in viewing the microorganisms, the borough will supply schools with a highly innovative cardboard microscope, called a foldscope. We hope you persevere with the foldscopes, which can be a bit fiddly to use- but are so worth the effort!

We have focussed our lesson plans on habitats: There is an introductory lesson ‘Homes and Habitats’ to begin with and three additional lessons focussing on ponds, soils, and plants as these should be most abundant around the borough. There are PowerPoint slides in addition to the lesson plans that should guide you through the order we suggest for the lessons and activities.

However, please feel free to go through these in whatever order you see fit and feel free to pick and choose the activities you would like to do! To help make the learning activities as inclusive as we can, we have suggested various practical activities for both key stage 1 and key stage 2 pupils. Local school risk assessments should be carried out for all the activities we suggest. We’ve also tried to highlight two key species for biodiversity in Sutton, called the Stag Beetle and the Small Blue Butterfly.

Enjoy!

The UCL Young Bioscientist team for Sutton’s Hidden Worlds