Kids enjoy planting seeds, watching them sprout, and eventually harvesting what they have grown. Allowing children to become involved in the planning, caring, and harvesting of a garden not only gives parents a unique opportunity to spend time with their children, but it helps the kids develop an understanding of that which they are curious about – nature. Children also develop a sense of responsibility and pride in themselves, which can ultimately improve self-esteem.
One of the best ways to encourage enthusiasm for gardening is appealing to a child’s senses by adding plants not only for the eyes, but those they can taste, smell and touch. Vegetables are always a good choice for young children. They not only germinate quickly but can be eaten once they have matured.
These are the reasons why my grade 2 students visited a veggie garden last week.
Everyone worked hard under the scorching Spanish sun.
We learnt that everything
that grows in a veggie garden can be eaten.
Sometimes we eat leaves.
Other times we eat roots
Even some flowers are edible!
After so much work we needed to recover our strength with a yummy salad.
When we came back to school we built our veggie gardens using LEGO bricks. It was great team work!
Then we learnt the names of different veggies in English so that we could describe our veggie gardens in this language.
We sang a song stating how much we love veggies. By the way, did you know that LIKE may mean two different things in English?
Peppa Pig taught us what COMPOST is. Peppa always helps to improve our English!
Did you know that a tiny seed may turn into a big tree? Granpa Pig is kind of an expert in veggie gardening.
What do plants need for growing? Some group research on the Internet led us to this song.
We all love reading The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle. We read it several times and discussed what causes the demise of each seed. (Ex. the bird needing food, by the child picking the flower it no longer gets what it needs to survive, etc.) Each child then pretended he was the seed and writes his wonderful adventure from seed to plant. When completed, they were given sunflower seeds to use as they illustrate segments (beginning, middle, end) of their story.
For and end we were challenged to build LEGO veggies and fruits.
This is so fascinating and inspiring that not only children but also adults would like to be a part of that wonderful experience. Top job. Everyone can and should learn from it how to be a real teacher!
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