The joy of gardening with preschoolers
To the editor:
I have been a teacher and then director at All Superstars preschool for most of my adult life and have always been interested in discovering new and joyful ways to grow the minds of my enthusiastic little clients.
Since we live in the Sunshine State, our opportunities for outdoor learning are second to none! Our owner, Kate Sroka, is very interested in gardening and has shared this enthusiasm with us educators. So we have a delightful little gardening area adjacent to our playground. The children love their daily visits to the garden and are always excited to see how their plants are coming along.
By growing primarily fruits and vegetables, we have the added bonus of being able to eat the results of our labor. There is nothing the children enjoy more than a healthy and tasty lettuce and tomato salad that they have literally been connected with from scratch. The pineapples we grow are unbelievably sweet and make a very popular dessert!
It is so rewarding to teach in such a productive way. Even our 3-year-olds know, from direct experience, that tomato seedlings are green and come out of the soil with two tiny leaves, that the flowers that form later are yellow and that the fruit that develops behind the flower starts out green and slowly turns red before we can pick it and eat it. What a great way to learn about colors! This surely beats going to the store and buying red tomatoes in a plastic package. We also have learned how to use our little rulers to measure plants and then we have recorded the measurements on a chart in our classrooms so we have begun to learn about scientific observation and documentation. We chat enthusiastically about our garden all the time and our vocabulary has really grown as a result. Knowing that a garden needs our daily attention, our children are learning early on that success will only come from care, responsibility, and knowledge.
We have also had tremendous unexpected learning opportunities from this project. We discovered, for example, that Eastern Black Swallowtail butterflies love to lay their eggs in late June on our parsley plants. We have observed firsthand that the caterpillars go through four different stages before forming a chrysalis and we have marveled at watching them emerge as beautiful butterflies. It’s always exciting to guess whether it is going to be a boy or a girl butterfly. How many 3-year-olds do you know who can tell a female Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly from a male?
Our school-age children are learning some basic business skills from our garden as well. They love to harvest the excess herbs and fruits and then sell them to the parents in the late afternoon when they come to pick up their children. The proceeds are all donated to Miss Kate’s Rotary Club and the children have now learned a lot about this organization and the good it does all around the world.
All in all, it seems to me that our garden is one of the most enjoyable and effective teaching tools any early childhood educator could ever wish for.
Wendy Katz
Cape Coral