Dear Shawn Letter – Jonathan Brown

Dear Shawn,

First and foremost, we would just like to express our gratitude. We appreciate the chance to work closely with The Missouri Botanical Gardens to improve the gardens and patrons’ experience. Excited is truly an understatement!

In our subgroup we have been searching for ways to combat the lack of knowledge about the history of Shaw and The Missouri Botanical Garden. In our subgroup, we have figured out our population and outreach audience. Essentially, we are searching for ways to create an educational program for the public about the history of MOBOT and Henry Shaw. We plan to create a PDF lesson plan that can be accessed online, digitally and in paper form without having to utilize a cellular device.

The lesson plan we plan to create and soon implement will be over the course of 3-5 days. In the first day, it will be “lecture day. “During the lecture, it will consist of essential information about the history of MOBOT and Henry Shaw. We do not want to make the lectures too long because we do not want to risk boring the students, rather, we want to inform them and keep them actively engaged. In the second day, we would start with a refresher of the lecture prior and give a brief synopsis of the information presented. This day is more hybrid, as in not lecturing the full time but instead lecturing and doing group activities. During the first half of day two, it will be a recap and presenting the very minimum new information and following that in the second half, there will be a group activity for the students to do. Day three will be activity heavy and open discussion, so most of the class in the student’s hand rather than the instructor. more information and activities. The fourth day would be a reflection day. During this time, the instructor should give room for students to discuss amongst themselves, ask any questions, etc. We do not want to give a formal test, but this day acts as a “test.” Students will be asked a few questions and will be able to provide feedback on what they have learned, what they liked and disliked, etc. To reiterate, the content will consist of information about MOBOT and Henry Shaw’s history.

Our target audience is grades 5^th-12^th. Grades. To ensure that we are catering to our audience we plan to have two separate lesson plans. 5^th-8^th grade has the same lesson plan and 9^th-12^t^h has the same lesson plan. The content will consist of the same information, the only difference is the way in which we’re designing it. Vocabulary and activities will vary between the two grade groups. We are aware that MOBOT have lesson plans already. We want to utilize this opportunity to our fullest potential and want to work closely with the education department being that they may be able to help aide and guide us in the right direction.

The main question we have for MOBOT education department is, what is the lesson plan and what schools have access to the lesson plan? With the knowledge of this information, we can do a variety of things such as add to the plan, figure which schools we want to have access to, what to take away from the lesson plan, etc. TaKara Gilbert and Zina Kuebee will oversee information and education content research. Karmen Thornton will be in charge of researching what activities are best for audience participation. Jonathan Brown is our public relations (connecting with schools and programs that are willing to implement our lesson plan). Cullen Krieg will be responsible for our visuals and engagement. Once again, we are so excited to start working more hands on with MOBOT and implement our project! Thank you for your time and help.

Sincerely, TaKara, Zina, Karmen, JB, and Cullen.