Garden-Based Learning: Worth the Consideration   

Throughout the years, educators have been trying — in some cases successfully — to modify the avenues through which learners acquire knowledge. The relevant stakeholders are gradually tuning the classroom to a fuller experience, where students can effortlessly gain knowledge through engaging and exciting means. Various schemes have thus far demonstrated the immense benefits of shaping education to the learners’ tune.

One of the most recent developments in this front is undoubtedly garden-based learning. You may have possibly come across this term in various educational circles. If the name is still foreign to you, then this article is rightfully meant for you. Primarily, garden-based learning encompasses a method of imparting knowledge that is founded outside the classroom. Students, especially young learners, carry out diverse projects and activities in the garden that simulate the real world.

Garden-based learning allows various disciplines to be integrated into the learning process as they participate in the activities. If you have had substantial experience with young kids, you are well aware of their hands-on approach. These children are always tinkering with anything that is in sight. Through such means, they further build associations with the concepts they have acquired in the classroom.

This method of teaching offers immense educational avenues where the learners acquire knowledge through otherwise ordinary daily routines. Such real-life efforts culminate in an educational path that allows the learners to develop in plenty of relevant areas, academically, personally, and socially. It further imparts diverse life and vocational skills as the learning process progresses.

Suffice it to say, garden-based learning also promotes responsibility in the young children as each is left to tend to their garden. It can develop into a deeper understanding of the science and economics behind their gardens in older learners. More so, they can equally develop and augmented spatial awareness. To cap it off, most of the skills acquired are easily transferrable to other aspects of life, both in the learner’s present and the future, too.

Advantages of Garden-Based Learning

As time has proved over and over again, this approach holds impactful benefits to all the relevant parties. Any credible garden-based learning article from a reliable essay service like https://www.privatewriting.com will undoubtedly demonstrate the outcomes.

In this article, we shall look at some of the prominent benefits of introducing garden-based learning to young children.

• Young learners acquire essential motor skills as they work on their gardens. As they work on their garden, these children are engaging in beneficial physical activities that hone their motor skills, both fine and gross. Working with tools refines their ability to work hands-on as they also gain improved hand-eye coordination. More so, there are exposed to real-life challenges that enhance their problem-solving skills.
• As the children work in the gardens, they find themselves in situations that allow them to draw correlations of their activities. Whereby such a child will be aware of their surroundings and engage his or her senses accordingly. Hence, they grow up paying attention to the essential details of their environment.
• Just as important, as these young learners tend to their own gardens, they learn and cultivate a culture of responsibility in themselves. These can range from small tasks, such as watering the plants to as significant as weeding. Through this process, they also learn the expected consequences of their actions.
• Garden-based learning also encourages healthy lifestyles from a formative age. First and foremost, they are more likely to spend more time outdoors, proactively. It increases the chances of such children adopting such a lifestyle in their entire lifetime. Furthermore, they are also more likely to eat what they have produced in their garden. Hence, this encourages them to adopt healthy eating habits.
• As these young learners tend to their gardens, achieving their expected outcomes significantly boosts their self-confidence. In such a way that a child will be immensely proud of themselves and their actions when they accomplish their garden goals.
• As an outdoor activity, gardening exposes these children to their surrounding environment. Wherein they can learn more vividly about nature as they engage in these hands-on experiences. It expands their breadth of knowledge from what they have learned in the classroom.

To most people, garden-based learning might be a novel concept. However, as this article highlights, it is an approach that has proved to engage learners with themselves and their surroundings actively and beneficially. Equally important, it also presents a new learning frontier that enhances the learning process while simultaneously imparting essential skills in the learners.