Chicago Botanic Garden

Cove

The Cove will be a center of learning about the importance of fresh water to the health of life on Earth. This long-contemplated teaching zone will anchor the Children’s Campus, introduce the wider public to a national model for water resource management, and provide a beautiful destination for pleasure and contemplation.

This year-round permanent Garden destination will feature a 15-by-40-foot canopied classroom, an educational materials storage structure, boardwalks, benches, a wading and water sampling zone, and a garden demonstrating the importance of shoreline management and aquatic plants.  The classroom and Cove will serve students and teachers, including those enrolled in the Garden’s educational programs:  College First, Science First, Camp CBG, and field trips; as well as Scouts, and teachers engaged in professional development.  The classroom and Cove will be accessible to students of all ages and abilities, including those in wheelchairs and those with special needs.

The outdoor classroom will provide families and school groups with an innovative aquatic environment.  In this space, set in a heavily planted area overlooking a small bay, children will be invited to don waders and use nets to conduct experiments examining aquatic plant and animal life, assess water quality, and discover the importance of water to human health.  The boardwalk will be approximately two feet above water level, large enough to hold 75 people total (two classes). The older children can reach over the edge of this boardwalk with dip nets.  There will be an area for younger children with steps going down to the water. At the bottom of the stairs a shallow stone edge will permit children to put on waders and go out with a dip net or put a few plants in benthic mesh.

Nearly one-quarter of the Garden’s 385 acres is water, including 81 acres of lakes, the Skokie River, and several wetland areas. Since the 1999, over 3.1 miles of shoreline have been restored using environmentally sensitive and innovative techniques—including the addition of one quarter million plants to the Garden’s lakeshores.   The Aquatic Cove will include approximately 800 feet of beautifully restored shoreline gardens that support a great variety of animal and plant life.  The Cove will exhibit the leadership and best practices that have characterized all of the Garden’s shoreline restoration.

Construction of the Cove is expected to begin in August 2011 in time for dedication in 2012, coinciding with the completion of the shoreline restoration of the Garden’s North Lake, made possible by a major grant from the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Background

Since it opened in 2006, the Children’s Learning Center has been home to the Chicago Botanic Garden’s award-winning education and family programs serving youth from pre-kindergarten through high school.  From Camp CBG, serving children ages two through twelve, to science and college preparatory programs for middle and high school students, all of our programs are based on an experiential learning philosophy using the Garden as a living laboratory for hands-on exploration. 

Each year, the Center welcomes 25,000 students on school field trips and classes.  Children’s camps and Scout programs bring another 10,000 children to the Garden to experience the wonders of the natural world.  Our staff train nearly 2,000 teachers a year through professional development workshops and educator conferences.  These teachers, in turn, are better able to teach their students about plants and the natural world.  The Center is the “home base” for education at every level.

To create more experiential learning opportunities, the Garden is expanding the boundaries of the Children’s Learning Center to create a learning campus for families and children.  The Campus will be a hub of activity with many opportunities for learning and discovery and will enable us to welcome more families with children, summer campers, teachers, and school groups to the Garden.  It will give greater flexibility to our staff and new types of activities for exploration of the natural world.  It will allow the Garden to broaden its service to the child-centered community of our region.

The first planned element of this campus is a new growing garden, scheduled for installation in 2011, which will allow students of every ability to get their hands in the soil.  They will learn how the garden is a living ecosystem that works for the benefit of humans, other plants, and fauna alike.  Families will be able to garden together and educators will get a very clear and enjoyable understanding of what gardening can mean for the life of their classroom and the way students learn. Our College First and Science First students will share the pavilion where they can gather and present their research findings at the end of their sessions.  Some of them may even conduct growing experiments there.

Teaching about Healthy Aquatic Ecosystems

Since 1999, the Chicago Botanic Garden has been engaged in a major project to enhance the water quality of its 60-acre lake system, address erosion problems along the six miles of shoreline, and educate the public about the importance of our fresh water system – for the garden and the larger natural environment.  Goals of shoreline enhancement are to develop a healthy aquatic ecosystem that can support a diverse collection of aquatic plants.

At the Cove, children will learn about the importance of this freshwater system, the hydrological cycles on which the Garden depends, and how what we do on land dramatically impacts the quality and quantity of our freshwater resources. The Cove will become a new focus for school field trip activities, which can now develop a set of offerings specifically around fresh water systems, as well as a venue for new weekend family and even adult education programs that focus on this topic. Activities at the Cove will include presentations and explorations of aquatic ecology – the animal, insect, and plant life that exist in a healthy shoreline – and the threats to water health that can come from landscape management, agriculture, residential over consumption, and other watershed issues. Curricula that address these subjects would focus the unique chemical and physical characteristics of water, native aquatic biodiversity, local and regional watersheds, the potential impact of climate change on water availability, and conservation methods that will best protect this precious resource in the future.  These teaching opportunities will help address a current lack of capacity to teach these subjects in most schools.

Project Goals

The Cove will provide a safe, stimulating space for active learning by children and youth—from toddlers to high school students, in school and camp groups, in summer science programs, and with visiting families.

Children and families of all backgrounds and abilities will have access to the Cove.  In addition to the 83,000 family members who take part in on-site programs, an estimated 10,000 low-income Chicago Public School students will benefit annually through field trips.  Another 2,000 teachers from early childhood through high school will gain content knowledge, lesson plans, and the materials to support classroom teaching through the Garden’s many teacher professional development programs offered each year.

The Cove will provide children a space of their own—where they can learn as children learn best: through active exploration and experimentation.  Children will be able to reward their curiosity about how water “works,” bond with the natural world, and better understand the interdependence of humans and nature.