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Green Thumbs at Girven Road
Gardening is a great hand-on experience that offers so many fun and interesting learning opportunities for our tamariki. At BestStart Girven Road we have been doing lots of gardening with the children in our Akiaki room and they are loving it. These are some simple tasks that our children love to help with:
- planting seeds and watching them grow
- Helping to pull out weeds
- Water the gardening
As you can see from the tasks above, gardening engages all sorts of senses and helps children to develop fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and the confidence in using the tools. They can feel the texture of wet and dry soil, water, seeds, leave, and flowers. They get to smell the scents of soil and flower and taste the vegetable of course. They get a real sense of achievement seeing the plants growing each day.
Children gain a keen interest in eating the vegetables if they help with growing them. It encourages healthy eating habits for the children from a very young age.
Growing flowers or vegetables from the seedling or baby plants requires care and attention. It is a great opportunity for the children to learn taking responsibility in looking after the plants and waiting patiently for them to grow.
There are so much learning happening during the gardening time. We are looking forward to watching the plants growing in our garden.