The Botanical Garden of Ajuda holiday program Sofia Espírito Santo

The Botanical Garden of Ajuda holiday program
Sofia Espírito Santo(1), Dalila Espírito Santo(2)
(1) Identidadequatro – Pessoas, Eventos e Comunicação, Lda., Rua D.
Pedro V, 149-2º, 1250-093, Lisboa, Portugal. [email protected]
(2) Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Jardim Botânico da Ajuda, Calçada
da Ajuda, 1350-010 Lisboa, Portugal; [email protected]
In Easter and summer holydays the Garden is full of children. The
holyday programs follow a subject: “The other Continents”, “The five
senses”, “Plants of the Garden”, “The Environmental Year”. Divided in
groups by the age and by the education level, they are followed by
monitors formed in the Garden. The day is divided in two parts:
• In the morning, works of plastic expression, laboratory
demonstrations, films,…, and basic works of gardening: to sow, to
plant, to water, to clean of the harmful grasses. To advise in these
works the gardeners are called; to be able to teach what they had
made during all the life is to them especially rewarding. As motivation,
later to come back to the Garden, stay, of each group, a new plant in
the Botanical Collection.
• In the afternoon, through the initiation to the theater, the children
feel and enjoy the garden. One weekly visit guided by the children, in a
scenic play, involves these and the familiar ones.
In the current year, in parallel with the holyday programs, it runs the
preparation, to play in open-air, of “Alice in Wonder Garden of the
Marvels” an adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books and integrally
performed by children. Alice is a real, intelligent and rational girl as the
children of the public, who to the long one of the part interacts with the
foolishness and the unfortunateness of the remaining characters. Between
laughs, Alice and the children of the public are collated with some
nonsense of the real world, as that ones that say (non) respect to the
environment. Of this form they are sensitized for the ambient questions
of a so didactic form how much amused.