Benefits of Gardening with Children
- Sarah Morrison
- Sep 4, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 18, 2018
Sensory Development
To start off, gardening and planting a garden develops children's 7 senses: Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, vestibular and proprioception senses. A child gardening encourages children to use their sight, as it encourages them to observe their environment and appreciate the colours and patterns of what grows in the garden. Thus, encouraging the children to appreciate the beauty of nature and what's around them is a crucial part of their development, especially their sight sense, this also helps develop and support other senses as well. For example, touch, this sense goes hand in hand with sight. Though they are not related in a direct sense, To see and feel your environment benefits each other. Feeling different textures and associating the two help children learn in a kinaesthetic way. Touch also correlates with the proprioception sense, touching and realizing, learning and taking in factors like touch and proprioception helps children grasp body awareness sense. How their body parts are relative to each other. It also gives them information about how much force to use in certain activities. Tasting is a really big component in this one in particular, as growing a garden can allow you to plant fruits and vegetables for consumption. Tasting what's you've grown is satisfying for children, as it is a form of reward. Rewarding in the sense that they've grown these fruits and vegetables, thus they have the chance to taste them as well. This is very beneficial for that sensory development, and taste and smell also goes hand in hand with taste, for the same concept of reward. But smell can also be benefited in another way that doesn't involving eating anything from the garden. It can be as simple as smelling nature around you, the dirt, the air, the fruits and vegetable, the decay of anything in the garden, bringing up composting in that same matter as well. Finally, vestibular sense is a sense of movement and balance. Giving information about where their head and body are in space. It allows them to stay upright while we sit, stand, and walk. Which can be backed up with the fact that, if your garden in outside, children can work on these physical attributions in many ways.
Gardening Engages and Helps Children to Develop
Like for example math skills and some artistic and scientific concepts are seen in activities involving gardening. Math, measuring the garden area and arranging shapes to plan the growing space. Basic counting exercises, counting the number of seeds planted and counting the number that grow (Grant, 2018).
With science, children can learn chemistry through composting, biology through interaction with the organisms they encounter, the quantitative and qualitative processes through planting and managing seeds, ecology as they become part of the environment, life sciences as they watch a seed grow, and meteorology and weather studies through their assessment of the weather and its effects on the garden (Grant, 2018).
Art: integrating gardening with the arts is a good way to include activities that have a creative focus. Art activities teach ecological literacy and inspire new enthusiasm for garden-based learning. Supporting children to creatively express themselves and their garden experiences like dirt art, printmaking, time-lapse photography of the garden's progress, creative journals of the plants growing and other creative projects.
Encourages a Good Lifestyle and Healthy Eating:
Being resourceful is a great attribute that teach children independence and appreciation. To add, a healthy lifestyle encourages a more positive view on other life oriented choices as well. Not only that, but also has more tangible rewards like mentioned above, having the opportunity to eat or help cook with the fruits and vegetables they've grown. It also teaches responsibility and patience, the responsibility to plan, organize and take action on the garden. Being responsible of taking care of the plants, digging holes to put seeds, bulbs or sprouts in the ground, watering them, clipping them, adding vitamins to the soil are examples of tasks to do. Being as big as creating the garden from scratch or just watering, cultivating the fruits and vegetables are just as beneficial, depending on their age, and capabilities, but taking up some of the responsibility is a big part. Patience, creating the garden takes patience, as well as waiting for the plants to grow, but there are also benefits in that for children.
Here's a great little chart that shows some first steps of creating a garden:
Resources to Start a Garden with Young Children:
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