The experience of growing a garden can help home school students learn a great deal. A garden can be very rewarding and also very frustrating. Growing a successful garden doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are some things that your home school student can learn from working on a garden:
1. Practical demonstration of how plants grow – You can read all you want about plant cycles in a textbook, but until you see it happen before your eyes, it doesn’t always make sense. Maintaining a garden shows children how a seed grows into a plant and how weeds grow right along with plants. They see a demonstration of how weeds can choke out a plant if they are not properly cared for.
2. Problem solving skills – When your plant doesn’t grow or you see holes or bugs all over your plants, you need to figure out what to do. This might cause motivation for further research on how to take care of the problem.
3. Growing plants can take some patience and perseverance – Sometimes it’s hard to wait for that seed to pop out of the ground or for the fruit to appear on their plant. Sometimes those pesky weeds keep coming up and need to be pulled and pulled again. Sometimes you need to keep tending to the plant that gets bugs or diseased. Regular maintenance of weeds is required to have a successful garden.
4. Gardening can be good therapy – After working hard and maintaining a garden it can be a wonderful experience to just go out in your garden and walk around to look at the plants and the wonders of God’s creation.
5. Multiple grades can benefit – A two year old and a 100 year old person can learn from and enjoy a garden. A small child can help plant and cover seeds over with dirt along with picking a few weeds. An older child can pick quite a few more weeds and learn about how the flower turns into the harvest. All ages can help with harvesting and processing the food that was harvested.
Even children living in a city can benefit from gardening. All you need is some dirt, a seed, water and sunlight. Try some easy plants first like: carrots, zucchini, tomatoes, beans, lettuce, and many more. Sometimes maintaining a garden can teach your child much more than they would ever learn from a book. There are many benefits for both parent and student.
