GreenSchool at New York Botanical Garden

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

This proposal is for a day-long field trip and workshop to the New York Botanical Garden for the GreenSchool Workshop, "The Life Cycle of a Plant." My second grade class will be starting a unit of study in May that will focus on plants: their life cycle, the parts of plants, and the role they play in their environment. There will be two writing projects included before visiting the Bronx Botanical Garden: one involves making daily observations of the growth of lima beans, while the other includes producing a report of information about plants and their life cycle. The primary literacy focus will be inferencing and drawing conclusions. The field trip to the Bronx Botanical Garden will take place through the "GreenSchool" Children's Workshop, a wonderful and highly educational environment where our students will learn so much in the span of about four hours. This workshop will give the children hands-on experience that extends what they have learned in class, which will leave a positive impression that they will likely remember for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, the science curriculum at our school has been poorly funded by New York City, forcing our students to learn science in the auditorium, one entire grade at a time, through lectures similar to large college classes. There is no hands-on learning present in this environment. In addition, very few of them have ever actually visited the botanical garden, despite being located relatively close to our school. To make matters worse, my students come from one of the poorest parts of New York City. Virtually all of them qualify for free lunch at our school, and many of their parents also qualify for social welfare services. Their parents are not able to afford the cost of this trip, though seemingly affordable to others; hence, they rarely are afforded this kind of opportunity to grow academically. Thanks to the parental support present in our classes, many of the students have made tremendous gains academically this year in literacy, but there is still so much more they can learn before the school year is over. This trip can extend their learning to a new level by making connections from the books we read and write about in class to the "real" world. (For more information about the trip, you can visit www.nybg.org)