Project Green Reach

Project Green Reach (PGR) is a science-focused school outreach program for teachers and students that is designed specifically to work with Brooklyn's Title I schools. It is an entity within the education department at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is a world-renowned botanic garden located in Brooklyn, New York. PGR is estimated to reach 2,500 students annually in Brooklyn's most under-served neighborhoods. Funding for PGR comes mostly from private grants. This allows the programs that operate under the auspices of PGR to be very inexpensive, and therefore accessible for the economically disadvantaged.

School Year Programming

During the school year, Project Green Reach instructors partner with classroom teachers in Brooklyn's Title I schools. During the course of the school year, PGR works with 80 classes of students, grades kindergarten through eighth grade. Each class of PGR participants has three sessions with PGR: one school visit in which the students paritcipate in a botanically oriented workshop, one school visit in which the students perform some community service project, and one visit to the garden in which the students explore the plants that are on display and participate in some hands-on activity in the greenhouses. In addition, PGR runs two workshops in which only the teachers of participating classes learn about how to teach botany and environemntal science.

Currently, PGR offers four lesson plans for their classroom visit workshops: life cycle of a bulb, kitchen botany, desert environments, and the tropical rainforest.

Summer Program

At the end of the school year, participating teachers of grades 4, 5 and 6 are aksed to nominate one or two students who reacted positively to the classroom visit, the tour of the Garden, and/or the ongoing investigation with plants in their classroom to apply for PGR's summer program. One other important qualification for admission to the program is that the student should have little or no other summer programming options. Candidates for the summer program are nominated by their teachers, and go through a rigorous application and interview process before being accepted into the program.

The accepted applicants then participate in Project Green Reach's six-week summer program, which is divided into two smaller subsections: the Junior Botanist program, and the Plant Investigator Program.

History

Project Green Reach began in 1986

References

(1)http://www.bbg.org/edu/teachers/greenreach.html (2)http://www.bgci.org/educationcongress/proceedings/Authors/Morgan,%20Susan%20-%20RP.pdf