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Green Thumb Kaitiaki

Here at Beststart Welcome Bay, one of our centre priorities is around promoting awareness, knowledge, and care for our environment, supporting the children to be kaitiakitanga to the environment.

We support the tamariki in developing their working theories to take care of papatuanuku and their centre environment through their creativity and play. Recently, our learning in this area has been focused on the garden, teaching and empowering tamariki to grow our own vegetables, harvest them, and then have them cooked for our lunch.

This has created lots of discussions about the different types of food and how to make healthy choices to give our bodies the energy they need. We have found that the tamariki love to take part in the planting, watering, and harvesting of our veggies and we have seen an increase in tamariki trying a wider range of food because of this.

So far we have planted and eaten spinach, silverbeet, capsicums, zucchini, and celery. Our next crop will include beetroot, broad beans, broccoli, and spring onions. As a team, we love that we can teach sustainable practices to our tamariki and then pass on this learning to our wider community.