Gardening aids learning, contribution, engagement & participation and the skills are transferable into home and work environs.
Guerrilla Gardening Program
Gardening is a terrific way for all children and young people to learn about their world, contribute to their households, engage in learning with embedded sensory components (such as heavy work) and participate in a naturally social activity. As students become older, it is a natural way to participate in regular, physical exercise.
In this Secondary Life Skills unit of work, students create a variety of gardening projects using new and used materials. Students are involved in all stages of the design process of each project, from conception, initial planning, building and maintenance and take responsibility for maintaining the immediate surrounds of their environment. The plants can be chosen from flowers, native plants, vegetables or bulbs etc. Students learn about and participate in the construction of new garden additions as well as the maintenance of current ones. Gardening activities include both outdoor and indoor projects such as watering a gardening, planting seeds and/or seedlings into pots, growing grass from seed, creating garden decorations and regrowing vegetables. Students engage in a variety of different independent and group-learning activities including interwrite-board based theory lessons, music and video clips, differentiated worksheets, outdoor yard work, indoor project work and measurements and observations of plant growth.
The skills and interests that students develop in the Guerrilla Gardening program are perfectly suited for transferal into the home and/or work environments in future years.
Gardening has so many possibilities and can be explored in many diverse ways and environments. Many of the projects conducted in this particular unit of work are smaller, independent, indoor gardening projects that students can do themselves or with a partner. I also encourage you to try out some bigger, longer term projects like planting and maintaining a vegetable plot or designing and building a vertical herb garden. The possibilities are endless and the results are amazing.
