TEACHING PLANNING FOR BOTANY LEARNING THROUGH FIELD CLASSES ON INTERPRETATIVE ECOLOGICAL TRAIL
Environmental Education, Field Practices, Teaching Botany
Brazil is recognized worldwide for its rich biodiversity, hosting about 20% of the world's biological species richness. Considering only plant species, Brazil has approximately 46,451 species, representing the greatest richness of plants on the planet. The existence of this high biodiversity is currently threatened, mainly by factors such as the accelerated impact of human activities on the use of natural resources. Faced with this unsustainable use of natural resources, authors emphasize environmental education as a way for such disturbances to decrease or even end. In this perspective, practical classes in the field with a focus on teaching botany become fundamental for the development of science classes, and fundamental to carry out the interaction between the student and his socio-environmental reality, since there is evidence of a lack of motivation on the part of students to teach. learning botany, and lack of contextualization of teaching with the reality of students. In addition, the lack of scientific work on the teaching of botany, with an even greater lack of studies on the Brazilian flora, spurred this study. Based on these questions, this work was divided into two chapters, with two main objectives. The first sought to develop an educational booklet containing a guide and lesson plans for an interpretative ecological trail with different botany contents, composed with illustrations. The second chapter, through questionnaires to investigate the students' knowledge, evaluated the pedagogical potential of using an interpretive ecological trail in the application of botany content, through different methodologies (theoretical and practical classes), for elementary school students. With the elaboration of this study, a differentiated alternative is presented to enhance the teaching of science and botany content, so that they feel excited and involved in the teaching/learning process, enhancing the assimilation of the content. In addition, the results of this study demonstrate the relevance of working on botany from the content level of each class. It was observed that the 6th grade students did not initially have much interest and knowledge in the subject, which started to be reflected in theoretical and practical activities. Thus, it is concluded that for the application of practical classes on ecological trails, it is essential to prepare such an environment, identify the species present on the trail, stopping points and knowledge about the public to be approached, to enhance the transmission and construction of the knowledge, and raise students' awareness of the topic addressed Within this perspective, the importance of trails in raising students' awareness of botany and environmental education is evident.