Gardens, Grubs And Gorgeous Flowers... Why Kids Love To Be Outside!

Gardening is a great way to get kids outdoors and away from their devices. When children spend time outside, they love to be active, explore and learn about their surroundings. With the days getting warmer why not help them grow their own garden! This is a great way to nurture and develop their curiosity, be more creative, and introduce them to flowers, vegetables and fruits.

Faafetai showing us a variety of different leaves found in our garden.

There are so many options for filling your garden, sometimes its hard to pick which plants to grow, but always start with the basics and see what works for you and your child. A low-maintenance plant to begin with, will help ease your child into the gardening process. Sometimes it’s a great idea to teach them about the life cycle of a plant before you’ve started your garden, this helps to hold your child’s attention and interest through every stage of the plant’s life.

Here at Aukilani Kids we have been learning about The Life Cycle of a Bean Plant and what it requires to grow: good soil, sunlight (warmth), regular watering (food), and a lot of patience (waiting)

We teach our children that, in order for our plants to thrive we need to show them a lot of love and care which means regular visits to check on our beans. Much like our parents and teachers showing our kids a lot of love and attention so that our tamaiti are able to thrive and grow into confident young learners.

'we need to show [our plants] a lot of love and care'

Last week saw us clearing out the garden and getting it ready for when our bean plants have sprouted and are ready to be planted into a bigger garden bed, and for many other herbs and vegetables plants. Our fantastic little superstars worked together to pull out weeds and clean up our gardens.

Our amazing teachers have also been busy planning and preparing our beans for planting and we are so excited to see it all coming together nicely.

Pretty Spring Flowers

Check out our pictures below of what we’ve been up to lately.

Here our tamaiti are learning about the life cycle of a bean plant.

Here is another image we are using to show our tamaiti the different stages of a bean plant.

1st stage of our beans we started with some cotton buds mixed with a tiny bit of water to keep them hydrated.

Later we moved our beans outside where it was warmer as our beans were starting to grow

Once our beans started to brown and 'split', we moved them into little seedling pots ready to sprout.

Here we are clearing our weeds to make way for a garden bed.

Aukilani Kids garden bed.

Our tamaiti having fun in the outdoors space at Aukilani Kids.