Meaningful learning and wellbeing in the garden

Students from Classes 3 to 6 have been involved in the process of sculpting the landscape for our new Water Garden: from visioning and planning, disassembling old garden beds, re-using what was there, creating something new to caring for, sharing and enjoying it.

Of course they have been developing these construction skills from  before Preschool and Kindergarten stages. In addition to the housekeeping of caring for their classrooms and the garden spaces, the students build elaborate play structures with their wooden blocks and build ‘life sized’ cubbies.

Even the delicate fairy gardens made of sand, earth, leaves, sticks and flowers have required such navigation skills as they practise in these early education and primary class years. By Classes 1 and 2 the students have  more intricate fairy homes and erect complex cubby houses with long and  heavy logs, making walls with leaves and soil as seen in the last newsletter.

Accompanying this play is the rapidly developing and sophisticated language, cognitive, spatial perception and orientation skills required for such architectural and engineering tasks: life skills!

In gardening lessons, students are delighted for any opportunity to build up a biodynamic compost heap or garden bed and to dig down into the ground to aerate the soil, harvest mature composted soil or create a water garden! Their bodies remember the skills they practised in younger years, perhaps at the Willoughby or Castlecrag campuses while digging in garden beds and balancing wheelbarrows carrying composted soil.

At every gardening class there are opportunities to do meaningful work in creating and maintaining the garden spaces as well as in foraging in the garden to make a meal to share with herbal tea at the end of the lesson.

Students say…

"It tastes so much better when you make it yourself" were the words of a Class 4 student back in May.

"My parents want to know how we make our garden stir fry" students declare. It's a delight that meaningful work and skills are applied at home as many students knowingly create and tend a garden. Delicious meals for the family are made too!

There is wellbeing for each class as a whole while stories of task accomplishments are shared with all enjoying the sustenance offered.