As teachers, we have always used the environment as the third teacher. We are extremely fortunate to have such a beautiful space outdoors, so this glorious summer, we decided to take our learning outdoors and shower our garden beds with some aroha.
We started by spending time talking to our children about our outside spaces, inviting them to offer suggestions as to how we could make the environment more inviting. Many suggestions came out from our discussions, but we finally decided to go with the idea of garden planter boxes featuring different coloured flowers. Our children called it ‘Rainbow Garden’.
We read stories that featured rainbows and our children in turn used their imagination to create their own versions of rainbows. The research and learning helped our children identify the colours of the rainbow and the colour of the plants that we needed to source.
We then created two planter box designs, one in an arc shape and another in diagonal, with each child adding colour to the plan.
We used the plan as a guide when planting, with our children chosing the plants they wanted to plant and placed them in the bed following the design. It was lovely to see our children take such care in planting and there has been no shortage of volunteers to help us with the ongoing watering of the plants.
We can’t wait for more flowers to bloom. Hopefully our ‘Rainbow Garden’ will start to take on the full-colour spectrum of a rainbow soon.
