Gardening is a fun activity but the dirt involved discourages many people from participating in this activity. Gardening is now seen as an activity for adults and people who have taken it up as a profession. Though many have accepted this to be a norm, it doesn’t make it a truth. Gardening can be done by anyone, regardless of space, age, or education. Gardening with kids is not only fun, it’s also a great way to teach them a variety of life skills.
Through planting and taking care of plants, youngsters can have fun, build confidence, and improve or gain necessary skills to help them thrive in society. Here are five ways that gardening is good for children.
Gardening engages all our senses
An average human being has five senses: sight, touch, smell, hearing, and taste. Gardening enhances each of these senses and makes us more alert. As the plants grow, kids get to touch, see and smell them at every stage. They can feel the texture, see how the flowers blossom in different colors, and hear the sounds of dried leaves when you walk on them or when the wind blows.
They also please their taste buds by eating fruits like strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, and so on. Lastly, different plants give off different fragrances. Engaging kids in gardening will help them recognize smells. These little enhancements in the senses of kids will help a lot to make the child more passionate and curious about other things of life as they grow up.
Gardening with kids encourages healthy eating
Gardening with kids engages their taste buds. Everyone, including children, will be happy to eat the fruit of their labor. When kids are given a chance at gardening, they eat fruits and vegetables with pride that the price that they cultivated for themselves. Through this, parents and guardians can teach these kids about the importance of fruits and vegetables to their health. Eventually, the children will embrace healthy eating as a norm.
Gardening helps kids inside and outside of school
While in school, gardening can be used to make students understand the biology of how seeds germinate into plants and develop fruits. In chemistry, they can learn how to compost manure decomposes, and helps plants to grow faster. In mathematics, they can learn multiplication based on how many seeds are sown and how many fruits are reaped.
Outside of school, gardening is a means to connect with nature, relax your nerves, reduce stress, and take charge of emotions.
Gardening upswings the attention span
The attention span of the younger generation is taking a downward swing. Young ones find it hard to place their focus on a subject for a long time. Surprisingly, gardening can help these kids take care of this problem. Allow children to be in fully charge of their plants so they can monitor growth. Their involvement in the growth of the plants will help them pay more attention and increase their focus in the long run.
To help with this, you can move the garden into their room. Indoor gardening has been made possible with the help of LED grow lights. These lights allow plants to survive in the absence of sunlight. If you have the space, you could start gardening even in the winter instead of waiting for spring and better weather to begin growing plants.
Gardening with kids promotes self-confidence
For a child emerging into a world of strangers, self-confidence is one skill that will be needed to excel. Making friends, taking up tasks, choosing a career, and other important decisions that people will take in the course of their lives require self-confidence to make the right choice and avoid regret. Something as little as sowing a seed and watching it germinate into a plant is more than enough to make children trust themselves.
Gardening fosters family time
Gardening is also a great activity for the whole family. Depending on the size of your garden, it may involve everyone in planting, watering, pruning or weeding, and harvesting. The family can spend time together deciding what to plant and where. Kids can share what they’ve seen or done in the garden. Everyone can spend time together outside maintaining the garden. As your kids grow and can do more work, the garden can grow too.
In the beginning, it might seem quite discouraging to let your kids take care of a garden because of the dirt involved. However, you can give them the right equipment—gloves, rubber boots, shovels, watering cans, etc—and teach them how to maintain safety and cleanliness. Starting a mushroom growing tent or vegetable patch and teaching your kids how to maintain it can have great results for your family. Gardening makes a child more responsible. It makes them appreciate nature. The advantages are inexhaustible.
Have you tried gardening with your children?