curriculum
Baby Sprout EDU curriculum
Lesson plans, student worksheets and the teacher's guide for the plant science and nutrition unit, built with Avenues Lower Division teachers.
For: teachers, partners
Initiatives · 2021–present
Baby Sprout EDU
The kit, paired with a plant science and nutrition curriculum.
- Built with
- Avenues Lower School teachers
- First tested
- First grade class, spring 2021
- Now used in
- Two 5th grade science classes
- Kits donated
- 75
How it started
Baby Sprout EDU came out of remote learning. Students were at home in front of screens and teachers were looking for something physical they could do that still taught the standards.
We co-developed the curriculum with Lower Division teachers at Avenues, tested it with a first grade class in spring 2021, and expanded it to two 5th grade science classes that November. In August 2023 we donated 50 EDU kits across four Covenant House shelters in Manhattan and the Bronx.
What is inside
- Everything in a standard Baby Sprout kit
- Plant science and nutrition lesson plans
- Student observation worksheets
- Teacher's guide
Photographs
Gallery
Impact
What we have done so far
- EDU kits donated
- 75
- Baby Sprout EDU boxes donated to partner classrooms and shelters. Of these, 50 went to four Covenant House shelters in August 2023 and 25 to Avenues Lower School classes. The old EDU and Covenant House pages showed these two figures side by side without explaining that one is a subset of the other.
- Students reached
- 120
- Students who took part in a Baby Sprout EDU lesson led or co-led by MintBox. Counts individual students, not classroom visits. An earlier partner page claimed 5,000 people reached; that figure could not be reconciled with any record and has been removed.
Programs delivered here
Materials
Guides and materials
Field log
Build log
April 2026
MintBox in the curriculum: grades 2, 3 and 5
Three short classroom sessions — three to five minutes each, coordinated with a teacher — built to get students interested rather than to distribute. MintBox was worked into the curriculum across all three grades.
August 2023
Delivering the kits to Covenant House
We delivered the 50 EDU kits across four Covenant House shelters in Manhattan and the Bronx.
August 2023
A four-hour session to build 50 EDU kits
The whole team packed 50 Baby Sprout EDU kits in one afternoon — the fourth iteration of the design — ready for delivery to Covenant House.
November 2021
EDU expands to more classes at Avenues Lower School
Ethan and Zenchang introduced the curriculum to two 5th grade science classes, about 30 students, from lesson plans built with the Lower Division teachers. The model was student to student: Upper Division students designed and led the lessons rather than adults teaching into the classroom.
May 2021
The first Baby Sprout in a classroom
We brought a kit into a first grade class at Avenues to find out whether the material held a class's attention. It did, and that session became the basis for the EDU curriculum.