The Kentucky Children’s Garden (KCG) at The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky, was awarded $10,000 thanks to generous support from the MacAdam Early Childhood Education and Literacy Fund at the Blue Grass Community Foundation.

The purpose of this grant is to increase equitable access to early childhood education and literacy programs in Central Kentucky.

We used these funds to help pay the salary of our Education Coordinator and to support educational programming costs for over 3,200 children in the KCG in the 2023 season.

Specific lessons that the funding supported were aquatic macroinvertebrates investigation, owl pellet dissection, and scat identification. Items purchased with these funds include scat replicas, insect nets, aquatic macroinvertebrate stamps, gardening shovels, a fossil casting kit, watering cans, egg replicas, magnifying glasses, owl pellets, modeling clay, monarch caterpillars, and more!

With these funds, we were also able to diversify our book collection. Our books are available in a rotating selection for anyone to peruse inside the KCG during its regular hours of operation.

Now, we have books in both Spanish and Swahili languages as well as indigenous representative books. Research indicated Swahili is the third most spoken language in Lexington, KY, following English and Spanish, and we were eager to incorporate this language into our book collection. By having multiple language options, we hope to connect with all our visitors, not just those with whom we share a language.

To see the new titles in our collection, visit our Book Box in the KCG when we open in April! We will have a different set of books each month.