Educators Workshop

Whether you teach in a classroom, are in training to enter the classroom, or home-school your children, our Teacher & Educator Workshops are designed to maximize the educational value of the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens and demonstrate how the Zoo supports your academic goals.

Preschool through Second Grade Teachers & Educators

Discover how the Outback Steakhouse Australia Adventure and the Great Apes areas can be utilized to reinforce the curriculum specifically targeting: life cycles, families, and communities.  Discover how to integrate the following strands in your curriculum: Processes that Shape the Earth, How Living Things Interact with Their Environment; Time, Continuity and Change; People, Places and Environments; Skills and Techniques for Dance and Theater; and Cultural and Historical Connections of Music and Visual Arts.

Third through Fifth Grade Teachers

Uncover the multiple ways Wild Florida and Plains of East Africa can be your curriculum focus for culture, habitats, and animal population dynamics.  Discover how to integrate the following strands in your curriculum: Processes of Life, How Living Things Interact With Their Environment, The Nature of Science, Time, Continuity and Change, People, Places and Environments, Government and the Citizens, Skills and Techniques for Theater, and Cultural and Historical Connections of Dance, Music, Theater and Visual Arts.

Sixth through Twelfth Grade Teachers

In Range of the Jaguar there are so many ways to incorporate exercises in stakeholder dynamics and community compromises using real human-wildlife conflicts as examples.  Students participating in these exercises develop those essential critical thinking abilities such as: identifying and formulating questions, analyzing arguments, asking and answering questions, judging the credibility of sources, observing and judging observation reports, deducing and judging deductions, inducing and judging inductions, making and judging value judgments, defining terms and judging definitions, being sensitive to the feelings, level of knowledge, and degree of sophistication of others, and employing appropriate rhetorical strategies in discussions and presentations in appropriate ways.

In addition to Zoo specific workshops, the Education Department also offers the following workshops throughout the year:

Project WET (Water Education for Teachers)

Project Learning Tree (PLT)

Project WILD (Wildlife in Learning Design)

Birds in the City & Crows Count (Cornell Lab of Ornithology Citizen Scientist Monitoring Curricula)

Attention Duval County Public School Teachers: The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens Teacher & Educator Workshops help you earn master plan points through the L.E.N.S. (Laboratory Experiences in Natural Sciences) Component.  These workshops are marked accordingly.

If you have any questions, please contact the Education Department at (904) 757-4463 ext. 122.