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The ‘biodiversity contest’ is an educational innovation designed to uncover the plant diversity knowledge of children. This article, based on the experiences of the winners of 31 such contests, seeks to identify the methods through which children learn from their elders and the beliefs that the elders communicate to them. While elders develop in children knowledge about plants, they do not communicate a belief in active conservation. Though elders have a culturally determined preference for boys as apprentices, they do accommodate the education of girls. Systematic instruction, demonstration, questioning to test knowledge and memory, encouraging observation, and supervised practice, are methods the elders use during an extended apprenticeship. The contests have helped recognize the knowledge that children have acquired outside the school, and have helped teachers introduce curricular relevance.