Flashcards, games & lessons
Everything here is a PDF you can print on your own printer. For cards, print at Actual size (100%) on both sides; card stock is best.
Soil Life Flashcards
Eight 4-inch cards with real microscope photos on the front and what each one does in the soil on the back: fungal hyphae, mycorrhizal fungi, bacteria, actinomycetes, flagellates, ciliates, a bacteria-eating nematode and a root-eating nematode.
Try this
- Hold up a card: who can name it?
- Sort them: who eats whom in the soil food web?
- Then find them for real in the microscope simulator.
Microbe card games
35 soil microbes from the microscope game, each with a picture, a name and a fact. Print once, play four ways.
Printing tip: print the one-page alignment test first. It shows whether your printer flips on the long or the short edge, so the backs of the cards line up.
Microbe Memory
Flip two cards, find the pairs. 35 pairs plus a how-to-play card.
Dr. Dirt's Bingo
Twelve different boards and a caller's spinner with all 35 microbes. A whole class can play.
Guess the Microbe
Ask yes-or-no questions to find your partner's secret microbe, Guess Who style.
Dr. Dirt's Living Soil
A board game for 2 to 4 players with no dice: plant seeds, raise your farm's soil life, sell your harvest at the market and team up to build a food web. One lap of the board is one year in the garden.
Your turn, in four steps
Do a farm action, grab a Move card, read your new space, next player. Easy enough for young players, with real choices for older ones.
Microscope lab worksheets
Made for the microscope simulator: counting grid math, nematode ID, "What am I seeing?", a Soil Detective mystery and a Compare the Samples lesson, with a teacher and parent guide and the answer key on the last page.
Researcher
The Hard level, for high school, college and grown-ups.
Soil Tests Anyone Can Do at Home
Eleven kitchen and backyard experiments: the jar test, the ribbon test, the slake test, the earthworm count, the red cabbage pH test and more. Each one has its own one-page printout, or print them all as a cut-and-fold book.
"Soil Is Alive!"
Dr. Dirt's 40-minute visit for first and second grade: he reads Dr. Dirt and the Stubborn Seed, then puts real soil life on the screen with his microscope. The teacher packet has the big ideas, new words, the lesson minute by minute and the NGSS and Common Core connections.
