How gardening improves your child’s learning abilities.

If I told you that you can improve your child’s learning abilities in a very fun and easy way, what would you say? Sounds too good to be true? Well, don’t expect wonders, but it is true that you can help your child to improve his learning abilities by gardening! Let me explain it to you.

Gardening contains so many elements that are important for your child’s development, that it’s a perfect activity to support your child’s learning abilities. And with a little bit of fantasy you can offer a huge variety in fun training. 

Read on to discover some of the possibilities you have in your garden to really help your child develop to his best potential.

Gardening stimulates the brain

In the garden you engage all your senses and thus stimulate the brain. It strengthens sensory related brain connections and functions. When your child uses multiple senses to accomplish a task, he will learn more from the experience and retain more information. And the good news is, this applies to all ages, even adults. 

Research shows that children who participate in gardening projects score higher in science achievement than those who did not. (I wonder what Einstein's garden looked like! 😉)

The wonder of seeing a garden grow may spark your kids to ask questions like: Why do the plants need sun? How does the plant “drink” water? Why are worms good for the plants? Soon you will be talking about soil composition, photosynthesis and more!

Once you harvest your produce, think of all the brain-building vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients your kids will be eating and how that will continue to boost brain development. Foods like spinach, garlic and beets (which are all easy to grow) have been shown to help with cognitive function and can give your kids an advantage in their growth and development. 

A garden full of edible plants is also one of the few areas where you can actually safely employ your child’s sense of taste. You will be surprised about how many of the veggies they grow themselves they’ll like, even if they didn’t like the store bought version before.

Even if your kids may not love the foods they grow at first, teach them to keep tasting and trying and to train their taste buds to enjoy the bounty of their garden. It may be a good incentive for you to try some new recipes and let your children help cook them. Most children love helping in the kitchen!

And while working or playing in the garden using all the different senses, your child simultaneously trains his linguistic, cognitive and visual spatial skills.

Gardening trains many skills in a fun way

Adding a little math while gardening is super easy. There are plenty of tasks and events which require some sort of counting or math.

Think about figuring out the time between sowing and harvesting dates or measuring how much plants are growing from week to week or count the flowers on each plant.

Literacy skills training can be part of gardening too. Learning the names of different plants and reading what their growth requirements are on the seed or plant packages is a literacy activity. Another reading/writing activity could be making a map of your garden, a list of the vegetables you grow and labelling the veggie patches.

Cognitive development is all about intellectual skills such as remembering and analysing information and predicting outcomes. You can do plenty of that in your garden with children. For example:

• By asking open-ended questions about what you have already done in your garden and what they think you should do next, you are helping them think through the processes of preparing the soil, planting, watering and weeding. 

• Ask them to tell you about the differences between the various plants you are growing or the different parts of the plants themselves. 

• Show them the entire plant—roots, stem, leaves, flowers and seeds—or let them draw the plant at different stages of growth.

Visual-spatial skills help us estimate distances and relationships.  This important skill is trained in the garden by sowing, but also by remembering the sowing pattern and in that way distinguishing weeds from vegetables.

Other fun activities to train the visual-spatial skill in the garden are drawing the garden layout in different stages during the year. Plus using words such as next to, under, far, near, between, closer, further, to the left, to the right, in front of, adjacent, and parallel to describe distance and direction in the garden to train this brain skill.

Gardening promotes patience

Have you and your kids also become so used to instant gratification nowadays? And do you too feel like patience doesn’t come quite as easy and naturally anymore? Nothing encourages patience like waiting for a garden to come to life.

Gardening with your children is a great opportunity to remind yourself and teach the next generation that some things are worth the wait. And that some things are not available at certain times.

Talk with your children about seasons and which vegetables belong in which times of the year. 

Kick-start your gardening process with easy-to-grow herbs and vegetables like chives, radishes, pak choi and leaf lettuce or flowers like marigolds or sunflowers and then work up to species that take a little longer to appear.

Isn’t this all you want for your child?

To support your child developing to its best potential while doing a fun family activity, you can now join my Staycation Summer Camp. A 4-weeks online, fun pact family course in which you’ll build, sow and grow your first vegetable garden. 

See you soon in the garden!