Gardening, Sustainability and Literature for Children

Today we combined with our sister school and all of Year Two enjoyed ‘Gardening and Sustainability Day’. We ran three rotations focusing on worm farming and composting, growing from seeds and cuttings, and fairy gardens. Fairy gardens? Why yes! I love a good fairy garden (or dinosaur garden if that is more your thing), they are a perfect introduction to gardening and encourage children see the natural world in a whole new light; that little gumnut could also be a soup bowl, goblet, showerhead or lightbulb. Perfect!

There is nothing I like better than seeing young children getting grubby in the garden, and as I was discussing with one of the teachers today, you can cover a serious amount of curriculum content in a way that is hands on, innovative and has a real world context.

The Australian Curriculum places a strong emphasis on Sustainability as a priority for study in all areas of learning (see here).

I use literature as the starting point for pretty much every gardening activity I do at school and home:

• Worms and worm towers here.
• Carrot pots here.
• My love of Costa (no secret!) and school kitchen gardens here.
• My 100 fav books on sustainability here.
• Fairy gardens here.
• Dinosaur gardens here. We made our own decomposable pots for seeds and cuttings (above) using this tool here and learnt about creating low or no cost gardens using books.

With todays fairy garden, I really wanted to encourage the students to use natural, found materials to create the furniture and other items for their fairies, rather than adding plastic bibs and bobs to the school playground. We have talked before about ephemeral art and I wanted this to extend this idea so that they understood that they might make things for the fairies that are not there the next day due to wind, rain, decomposition or other little fingers taking or breaking their work and that this was totally fine. In a shared playground space, and in nature, one cannot be precious about ‘that is mine’ or ‘you can’t break that!’. The door is from Immy’s Minis, whom I have no affiliation with, but I adore, probably more than I should.

We read ‘Lily and the Fairy House’ and looked at the images in ‘Fairy Houses’ to gain inspiration and start young minds firing. Click on cover images or title links to purchase.