One of our mottoes here at Brooklyn Children’s Museum is a Marty Markowitz quotation:
Brooklyn is home to everyone from everywhere!
We firmly believe that here and love the opportunity to reflect the cultural diversity of our borough (and New York City, too) and the cultures of the people who have moved to Brooklyn from all around the world. Brooklyn Children’s Museum has an exhibit called World Brooklyn that shrinks Brooklyn stores to kid-size and shows the ethnic diversity of our borough through these stores.
Well, Greta had a great idea for teaching kids about culture through gardens, so she picked 14 countries from around the world: Mexico, China, Uganda, Italy, Peru, Thailand, Nigeria, Israel, Brazil, India, Japan, England, Russia, France, and Jamaica. Then, for each country, she picked a handful of representative plants and planted them together.
Above, the finished gardens are laid out in Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s Greenhouse.
As you can see, each garden also has labels that tell kids something about the country. The labels talk about how the plants are used, how they smell, what they feel like, and often how the plant is used in local cooking. The Thai garden, for example, has the following label with information about the ingredients in Pad Thai:
Another great example is the Peruvian garden!
You might not do 14 of these in your classroom, but it’s quite easy to pick a country you’re studying and grow 3 or 4 plants from that country to help students combine science and social studies knowledge and have an even richer understanding of culture.
You can also link this to the arts – check back tomorrow for information about that!
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