Learn
Guided pathways
Choose a pathway. Each one links a small set of guides in order, then asks a few questions to check what you can now see. Most run 15 to 25 minutes; the teacher track runs longer.
A day on the sand coast
Stand in the wallum and name it from what is in front of you, then say what made the sand that poor.
Pathway · 20 minReading a place — the same skill, four grounds
Practise the same read on four contrasting places, until you can stand on new ground, look at the plants, and name the rock, soil and water underneath them.
Pathway · 25 minReef to range — the whole gradient in one journey
Name the worlds of the coast in order, from the offshore reef to the basalt range, and learn the one rule that lines them all up: substrate, not rainfall.
Pathway · 20 minSignature species — every animal is a bundle of dependencies
Look at any signature species and see the knot of dependencies holding it up: the soil, the plant, the fire and the water it cannot live without.
Teacher track · 50 minWho eats whom, and who cleans up
Students name the producers, consumers and decomposers of a real heath, build food chains from a web of life, and learn what a food-web picture is claiming and what it is not.
Teacher track · 100 minWho says? Reading the evidence behind a food web
Students interrogate the Cooloola web of life as a set of claims: what each relationship asserts, what evidence carries it, and what it would take to know more.
Pathway · 20 minThe fire story — how flame draws the boundaries
Read the fire in a stretch of bush: the cones held shut for heat, the gums built to come back, the line where flame stops. Then say what a patchy burn will grow.
Teacher track · 40 minWhy poor is rich — the keystone idea, for the classroom
Students can look at bare sand, say what the leaching has taken out of it, then trace that poverty from the rock, through the soil, to the living heath.
Pathway · 15 minThe naturalist's year — the seasonal round
Read the season off the country around you, from wildflowers to frog song to whales passing the headlands, and know when to go out for each.
Pathway · 20 minThe soil story — why the ground decides everything
Stand on bleached white sand and say what the rain has carried away, how long the emptying took, and what still manages to grow on it.