Growing your own food is one of the most hands-on ways of learning about nature. A children’s garden is a priceless nature school where kids not only get exposed to nature, but also pick up new skills and can to put scientific concepts into practice.
Here’s what growing plants can do for your kids.
Gardening teaches new skills.
Few skills are more valuable than being able to grow your own food. It provides self-confidence, and a lifetime’s worth of fresh, organically grown produce that builds a healthy body and soul.
Gardening is one of the most productive gross motor activities for toddlers. As they help you in the garden, your little ones carry, bend, pull and pour. Planting seeds and harvesting produce also develop fine motor skills for toddlers.
Working in outdoor spaces helps develop spatial reasoning skills. Kids must form roughly straight lines – sometimes over long distances – as they plant in rows, and often eyeball the gap between plants when sowing seeds.
When they’re in the garden, kids learn about how nature functions.
The kids’ garden is a forest school at your doorstep, especially if you have large trees where local species of wildlife can make homes. In the garden, kids can appreciate nature’s function, cycles and breathtaking beauty. Gardening visually displays the seasons and the weather, how plants grow, where food comes from, and the life cycles of plants and animals.
Gardening is an opportunity for practical science lessons.
If you’re a homeschooling parent, the garden is an ideal location for holding a hands-on, real-to-life science lesson. Homeschooled kids can practice the essential scientific skills of experimenting, gathering and recording data, and drawing conclusions, from projects they can do in the garden.
Here’s some awesome gardening science inspiration to get you started on your scientific adventure.
To make their gardening experience convenient and even more fun, get your kids a children’s gardening set! Our kit includes everything a young gardener needs to grow his or her own food: child sized gardening tools (a high quality, metal-tipped spade, rake and trowel), a small watering can, biodegradable peat pots for seedlings, plant labels and a canvas garden tool bag to keep it all in.
Written by Rifke Hill
About the Author
Rifke Hill was raised on the sort of farm your grandparents told tales about – milking cows, gathering eggs, hoeing the soil, and building fires to heat water. She now spends part of her time copywriting online as a freelancer. The rest of it is spent nurturing and teaching her four energetic children, growing vegetables, baking bread, reading voraciously, having coffee with the neighbors, and enjoying the sunny slopes of the smallholding where she lives, in the Garden Route, South Africa.
