Gardening offers learning opportunities
In our ever-changing, modern world, our children spend less time outdoors and more time indoors.
Televisions, video games, and tablets have corralled our children into sterile surroundings, disconnected from nature. A Kaiser Foundation study showed that children 8 to 18 years of age spend an average of 7½ hours a day with digital media.
An alternative to electronic games and media is gardening. Gardening offers fun, healthy, and creative forms of engagement for children.
Most children enjoy being outdoors, digging in the soil and getting dirty. There is no better way to pry children away from a video screen and introduce them to the wonders of the natural world than to garden with a parent, grandparent, or family friend.
Gardening with children has a number of advantages. Gardening promotes healthy eating habits.
The best way to encourage children to eat their fruits and vegetables is to have them plant, grow and harvest their own food. Growing green beans may not make a child like to eat them, but it creates a connection that cannot be forged from a trip to the supermarket. Hands-on gardening can shape life-long healthy eating behaviors.
When started at a young age, gardening is an excellent way to teach environmental stewardship. Children allowed to interact with nature may want to preserve and foster its beauty. By spending time in the garden, they learn to identify and appreciate the flora and fauna. They learn not to fear the caterpillars, earthworms and toads, but to value and befriend them.
Gardening provides opportunities for science education. Learning about the nutrients in the soil, examining earthworms and insects with a hand lens, discovering the insects that make the garden their home, and investigating “green” activities such as composting or rain water collection are examples that interweave science with the garden experience.
Children can apply math skills they have learned during the school year while gardening. Younger children can measure plant growth from week to week, count the number of tomatoes they pick or use a rain gauge to calculate the amount of rain after a rainfall. Older children can make a garden map, graph plant growth or determine the ratio of seeds that are planted to those that germinate.
Gardening promotes a healthy body. Activities like carrying a heavy watering can, digging, weeding, and pushing a wheelbarrow promote gross motor skills. Planting individual seeds and deadheading flowers promote fine motor skills. The physical activity associated with gardening can teach children a pattern of life-long fitness activity.
Children love to get dirty, which runs counter to the modern concept of keeping hands sanitized. The “hygiene hypothesis” theorizes that lack of childhood exposure to germs actually increases a child's susceptibility to asthma, allergies and autoimmune diseases. It's good news then, that getting dirty may actually strengthen a child's immunity and overall health.The process of tending a plant, watching it bloom and harvesting its food takes time and patience, but in the end builds a child's self-confidence and sense of accomplishment. Gardening empowers children to make choices of which they can be proud.Gardening with children can be unpredictable, frustrating, messy and fun.Garden pests and Mother Nature can destroy your best-laid plans. But children should be involved in the garden, touching, tasting, and sometimes even destroying in order to understand the wonder of creating life from a tiny seed.At a time when more and more children are disconnected from nature, remaining indoors more than outside, it makes sense that they be introduced to the joy of digging in the dirt. Whether the garden is in a few pots on an apartment balcony or outside of the back door, children and families who garden are harvesting a lot more than food and flowers.<em>Mary Reefer has been a Penn State Extension Master Gardener Butler County since 2012.</em>
