Planting!!

Autumn is the time to prepare for the coming winter and one of things that we needed to do at Uxbridge was to plant our winter vegetable garden. The first thing we needed to do was to prepare the soil by removing any weeds and digging it over. The we planted our new seedlings. We had chosen sprouting Broccoli, Rainbow silverbeet, celery, kale and a mini brassica mix. We chose plants that were compact as we don't have a lot of space and a mixture of plants that were slow growing so that the children could watch them develop and fast growing so that we didn't have to wait too long to do some harvesting. We also chose plants such as the celery, silverbeet, and kale that had edible leaves so that the children can pick and taste as the plants grow. 

Participating in the care of our centre gives our Tamariki a sense of belonging and ownership. Watching something that you have planted grow is an enormously satisfying experience and we hope that we will also be able to harvest cook and eat our vegetables. Te Whariki emphasises the importance of Tamariki having a sense of responsibility  for the living world and knowledge of how to care for it.  Learning how to prepare the soil plant plants and care for a garden contributes to this learning. Working together on a project like this is also great for learning social skills such as sharing, negotiating and turn taking and the natural conversation that occurs as you work contributes to language development.