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Gardening with Anita from kiwi gardeners,

Tamariki in our 4 to 5-year-old classroom (totara) has been on a bit of a learning journey around the natural world. We started several months ago with a fortnightly gardening session with Anita from kiwi gardeners, planting out veggies and herbs, creating a planter box garden. We then moved onto looking after and maintaining the garden and learning about the food cycle, eventually harvesting the veggies and eating them for a yummy lunch!  As we progressed in our learning journey around the natural world tamariki became interested in learning about the insects and animal life in the soil. Hence the development of our worm farm which children now look after and harvest the ‘worm juice’ to supply our community pantry with rich fertilizer for our families gardens. The interest for children in the natural world is still very strong and so we extended the opportunities for learning again for tamariki by inviting TOCK into the centre to come and talk about sustainability and how we need to look after our home, the earth. Our facilitator was wonderful, children really engaged in her session with her recycled robot, learning about recycling, and the storytelling she engaged in around sustainability (including sign language 😊) related exceptionally well to the age of the tamariki participating. If you would like to explore TOCK the website to visit is https://tock.earth