"Where childhood matters...."
Kitchen Garden Program
At Cooloon we are lucky enough to have a large beautiful outdoor environment where our children love to explore, play and engage with nature.
We are always striving to improve our learning spaces and as such we have spent a lot of energy and time creating a large interactive garden where are children can get some hands on experience with planting, caring for and harvesting a large range of fruit, vegetables and herbs.
As the children prepare the garden, plant the vegetables and learn to care and nurture them a sense of accomplishment and responsibility grows. As we watch our plants grow we develop a growing understanding of how foods are grown and a respect for the time and care which is required along the way. There is nothing more exciting than finding some radishes or tomatoes ready to harvest and simply harvesting, washing them, then eating them right then and there. The educators like eating them like this as well.
Once we have some yummy vegetables or fruit ready to harvest we create a kitchen space in the playroom and learn how to prepare some healthy food. We recently made spinach and ricotta quiche. We teach cooking using real utensils and cooking techniques under the supervision of our educators to build an understanding of basic food prep and cooking techniques. The children use knives to chop and prepare, heat for cooking and hygiene practices are taught throughout the experience.
Whats growing now ?
We have been getting so many tomatoes off the bush over the last few weeks and we have recently planted some new seedlings, if we can only keep the brush turkeys out of the garden!!
It looks like the passion fruit vine might be getting close to baring some produce as well.
