Make a Biosphere and Mini Garden

Make a Biosphere and Mini Garden is part of Crabtree’s “Make-It Models” series. This book aims to provide students with both specific instructions for designing and building the components of a mini garden while also encouraging them to use their creativity to extend the learning in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math).

Overall, Make a Biosphere and Mini Garden has done a lot of things right. The illustrations are colourful, simplified drawings that support the instructions of the text. The pages are well-laid-out, and the instructions for each project are numbered in reasonable length chunks of information.

3. Put 30 shorter sticks in a pile and 35 full-length sticks in another pile. In these pictures, we’ve used different colors to identify the two lengths of sticks.
4. Place the coin or button onto cardboard and draw around it 21 times to make 21 circles. Cut them out. Cut five of them neatly in half to make 10 semicircles

Fact boxes are used to highlight important or additional information. These include “What You Need”, “Tip”, “Take It Further”, and “The Science Part!”.

TIP
As you work, you’ll find that you have to push the sticks inward to make them join up. You will see the dome shape start to appear.

Some of the information in the “Take It Further” boxes is gratuitous, “If you have enough pots and soil, you can plant other beans!”, but most of the information is helpful. “If you don’t want to grow vegetables or herbs, you could try some hothouse flowers instead. Flowers that like nice warm greenhouse include geraniums, nasturtiums, dahlias, and marigolds.”

Projects in Make a Biosphere and Mini Garden include “Garden Base”, “Grass Art”, “Bean Tree”, “Wildflower Corner”, “Geodesic Dome Greenhouse”, “Greenhouse Garden”, “Fountain”, “Summer House” and “Finishing Touches”. The final double-page spread shows “And Here is Your Finished Garden!” This final illustration is very helpful to see how everything can fit together.

The introduction to Make a Biosphere and Mini Garden isn’t as well-written as the instructions.

The biosphere is everything that is alive on Earth. But a human-made biosphere is a building in which the biosphere is recreated, such as a rain forest or woodland.

Calling the greenhouse a biosphere is an overstatement. By the book’s own glossary definition, a biosphere is “A building in which a biome (a community of plants and animals) is recreated, such as a rain forest or woodland”. The book should more accurately be titled “Make a Greenhouse and Mini Garden”.

But my main reservation about this book is that I haven’t tried the instructions with students. I think the instructions are clear, but I also think that when I first open any instructions from IKEA. Usually, I have to do it wrong once before I understand the actually well-written instructions. If you give this book to your Grade 4, 5, 6 students, be prepared to offer them support when needed. Their projects may not turn out exactly like the illustrations, but with help, it should be a good learning experience.