Search This Blog

Tuesday, 29 January 2019

Benefits of garden-based learning for children

Tim Moore
Foundation for Economic Education


The time you spend in the garden with your children is invaluable.

If you have children or work with children, then you probably have noticed that hands-on experiences help them make connections to the lessons they are learning. This is especially true when the lesson involves something you enjoy or have made a hobby out of, such as gardening. Hands-on learning experiences surround us if we take the time to look, and educational opportunities abound with a little ingenuity to turn daily tasks into lessons.

Help your children establish a sense of responsibility surrounding planning, caring for, and harvesting their own gardens. Older children can even get in on the spacial awareness, science, and finances behind it all. These lessons easily transfer to a larger picture: namely, how their own responsibilities and care of something living is integral to their attention to personal moral values as they grow.
Benefits of Children in the Garden

The benefits of children working in the garden have been studied for decades, with connections to independent learning and emotional growth identified as key potential effects. This could be due to the chores and tasks placed on young children early on in their development, which helps them gain a sense of importance and self-esteem, or even because of the confidence fostered by watching a plant grow and come to fruition under their close watch. No matter the study, the outcomes have reflected positively on children, which has led many educators to use gardens as part of their educational toolbox-a lesson that can be mimicked at home, as well.  


Read more

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...