Our first bounty!

Thank you for our happy hearts, rain and sunny weather.  Thank you for our food and that we are together.

 - Karakia Tawa Montessori Preschool and Little Earth Montessori

There is plenty of information available about the importance of school gardens.  Gardening with children helps them to connect with nature, it teaches them about nutrition, it introduces children to sustainable practices and children learn about the life cycle and science.  For us at Tawa Montessori Preschool and at Little Earth, the gardens play another very important role.  The gardens at our preschools give us reasons for celebration and nurture a sense of community.

Our recent gardening working bee at Tawa Montessori Preschool saw teachers, parents, friends, grandparents and the children spending two hours together, weeding, pruning, raking, sweeping and playing, followed with some well deserved food.  We had a great time in the garden, on a beautiful Friday afternoon.  Times like this happen less and less as we are busy with work and family commitments.  We forget how important these times are for the well-being of all of us as an individual, and as a family.  Spending time together and working for a common good fosters a sense of belonging, contributes to friendships and rekindles our relationships as teachers, parents, friends and children.  A garden is a beautiful setting for moments like these!

The gardens at our preschools also give us many opportunities for celebrations as we celebrate the seasons, as well as the many wonders and miracles we encounter in our gardens throughout the year.

Gardening is a part of our daily activities. We sow seeds and watch them grow, we attend to their needs and take care of the plants. This year Papatuanuku has been very generous  and provided us with plenty of vegetables and fruits at Little Earth. To share our bounty with our whanau we organised a summer Harvest Festival with a picnic lunch. The children  called it a “Veggie Party.”

The Harvest Festival served as a celebration of all of our work in the garden and the food grown on the land. It was a spontaneous, impromptu celebration, requiring only a low key organisation one week ahead. We prepared a menu from our harvest and the children all helped with the preparation. Each played a role to make our “veggie party” a success from harvesting, pasta-making, tomato sauce making, pesto making, bread making, juicing, and baking, to setting the table.

We had a big turn-out of families who brought along their savoury dishes whipped up from their garden’s produce, too. After blessing our food with our Karakia, we all sat down in our garden and shared the food. The family contributions and community spirit were overwhelming and we are still buzzing with excitement.

Thanks you to all who came, to our working bee at Tawa Montessori Preschool, and to our Harvest Festival at Little Earth Montessori: A garden truly grows more than just plants, it grows people!

- Anja

A Culture of Care and Respect

At both our preschools, our environment is one of beauty and harmony, with a curriculum centered on caring. We want our time spent together as a community to be a truly social experience. We play together, we work together.  We learn to make our own voice heard, as well as listen carefully for the voices of others.  We aim to not only respect each other, but show respect in all our interactions.

“We are all connected in the circle of life”

These words, inspired by my beautiful friend Marghanita from Outside with Marghanita, are on our gate and at our entrance.  We live these words in our daily practices. We care for our chickens who then care for us by providing us with eggs.  We use these eggs for making lemon honey, but then crush up the egg shells and feed them back to the chickens for extra nutrients. We plant seeds, water and care for them, nourished with coffee grounds from the local coffee shop.  We  later harvest the vegetables and use them in our food preparation.  Any scraps are given to our animals or put in the compost which will feed our soil. And the circle continues.

The children at our preschools engage their heads, hands and hearts in the garden and beyond.  They are fully involved in the physical work of collecting, transporting, setting up and maintaining the environments.  They show care in making sure the animals are taken care of, the creatures that live in our garden have a safe habitat, and the plants are well looked after.

Caring and creating a culture of respect, nurturing the heart and the emotional well being of each child is at the core of what we do.  We know that to be open to learning and confident to experiment, our ‘emotional fuel tank’ needs to be full. We also know that young children have a strong desire to be independent.  They want to be able to make their own choices, participate in their own daily care, and complete their own tasks.  Children do not want us to serve them, they want us to show them how they can do something for themselves. They need to make their own discoveries in learning.  Deep satisfaction does not come from watching someone else complete a job for you!  Satisfaction comes from repeated attempts, personal growth and eventual mastery.

Childhood is a journey that shapes the child for the rest of their life. In order to keepsake childhood, and to create a culture of care and respect, we need to create a warm haven for our children where they can feel safe and secure, where they can be independent and where they are given time to develop according to nature’s plan. In today’s hurried world, at Tawa Montessori Preschool and at Little Earth, we aim to provide the antidote to the stress and fast pace of our modern lifestyle, through reconnecting our children with nature. Animals, a garden, and a living landscape to explore are key elements of our preschool programme. Awakening the children’s awe and wonder for nature and its miracles are part of their daily experiences. Outdoors is where we ought to be!

- Anja

A visit across the Pacific

Recently I returned from a three week teacher exchange in Arizona, where I visited several pre-k programmes.  I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and I am very grateful for the warm welcome I received at the schools I visited.

Arizona has a very different climate from our lush green wet and windy Wellington in New Zealand. This was especially noticeable  in the different outdoor environments that I witnessed. The hot and dry desert climate creates challenges for most schools to establish and maintain a school garden or natural outdoor environment. However, this doesn’t mean it is not possible to create a beautiful, natural garden and outdoor playscape, as the Montessori Center School in Phoenix proved. They have a beautiful outdoor garden where the children and their families can learn and experience nature. It was a real pleasure to visit their beautiful sensory garden, designed to understand and enhance each of the senses - sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The garden also includes art stations, vegetable gardens, a hummingbird- and butterfly trail and a compass garden. They made good use of plants that grow in their area naturally, including the one plant that thrives in the Arizona desert environment, the cactus.

But it isn’t the climate only that is an obstacle for schools to create more natural outdoor environments. The combination of strict law, regulations and high insurance premiums pushes many schools into creating “soulless” playgrounds with low maintenance plastic toys and meaningless equipment. Combined with, in some cases, an absence of rooms with windows, and I couldn’t help but question what this does to the spirit and soul of the young child. 

During early childhood the brain is shaped by our daily experiences, necessary for growth. If we keep our children away from nature, limiting their experiences with the natural world, stifling the development of their biophilia, which is their natural love for the Earth, we will create a generation that suffers from nature deficit disorder, a term introduced by Richard Louv, and biophobia, a fear for the natural world. If that happens, who will be our future Earth Stewards? How can we expect our children to take care of our planet if they themselves have not developed any empathy, nor love, for the Earth they live on. Caring does not come naturally, it needs to be fostered. A lack of exposure to the nature experiences, combined with the rigid learning programmes that are more common in pre-k programmes, and the fear for safety, resulting in less time for free unstructured play and we are raising a generation of children far removed from a connection with the natural world. 

"We survive because we can love. And we love because we can empathize."

- Bruce Perry (“Born for Love”)

Bruce Perry, in his book ”Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential - and Endangered”, writes that three-, four-, and five-year-old children need to have lots of time for unstructured play. They need to explore, to negotiate the rules of made-up games with friends; they need  opportunities to practice compromise, negotiation, and sharing. Early childhood is a crucial time of life for the development of empathy.

And empathy is what we need if we want to have healthy relationships, not only with other human beings, but also with the natural world, our home the Earth. What other good way to develop empathy than providing children with authentic, natural environments. Environments that are not over regulated by adult rules and societal priorities, but environments where children learn to manage dangers and risks, and where they can have those lifeshaping experiences that shape not only their brain, but also their soul.

Many of the teachers I talked to would like to introduce more free play and nature into their programmes. As I shared with them our Little Earth programme and environment, they were enthusiastic and hopeful that with initiatives like  “Leave no child inside” and the “Let’s go outside’ movement” more support for more outdoor and natural experiences will become available. I hope that one day, soon, their school district and regulating bodies will share their hope and give them their full support.

- Anja

New life in our milk bottles

Our recycled milk bottles at Tawa Montessori have done us well.  It’s been nearly a year now since we first put them up.  They weathered a hot Summer, a wet Autumn and a cold Winter.  Now it is Spring and while the bottles are still in good shape, the plants look a bit sad.  Our new planted pansies are getting a hammering from our chickens who love to dust bath in our flower beds.  We decide that the milk bottles may be a much better home for our pansies.

Take the milk bottles of the shed wall and fill the bottles with new soil.

Get the pansies out of our garden and plant them in the milk bottles.

Water the plants and put a rod through the handles of the bottles to hang.

Fasten the wooden rod to the shed wall and done, they are ready to flower.

Children love working in the garden.  As they plant the flowers, they learn that flowers and plants are delicate and need to be handled with care.  They learn about watering, and the properties of dry and wet soil.  They can admire the instant colour beauty and observe the insects that visit the flowers.  Projects like this are not only a great way to introduce children to gardening, they are also a concrete hands on introduction to sustainability and environmental education.

- Anja

Healthy eating (2), making our own lemon honey

Tawa Montessori Preschool has several fruit trees growing in their garden.  We have an apple tree, a pear tree, a mandarin tree and a lemon tree.  Our lemon tree is heavy with lemons. This year we decided to use the lemons to make lemon honey.

This is how we make our own lemon honey.

Ingredients: 50 gm butter, 3 eggs, 1 cup sugar, and a few lemons.

Harvest the lemons.

Wash the lemons.

Squeeze the juice of of the lemons, lots of them.

Use a zester to get the rind of the lemon peel.

Add melted butter and sugar.

Collect some of our chicken eggs.

Add the eggs, the lemon juice and rind and mix and cook in the microwave.

Sweet!

Gardening, cooking, serving and eating, composting— these are truly basic things, but the lessons they could teach are drowned out by the clamor of the media and the insidious temptations of consumerism. Kids today are bombarded with a pop culture which teaches redemption through buying things. School gardens, on the other hand, turn pop culture upside–down. They teach redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting—for the things money can’t buy—the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives. Kids who learn environmental and nutritional lessons through school gardening—and school cooking and eating—learn how to lead ethical lives. —Alice Waters

- Anja
 

Alice Waters, “A World of Possibilities,” in Margo
Crabtree ed. The Edible Schoolyard, (Berkeley, Learning in
the Real World, Center for Ecoliteracy, 1999), p. 15.
71 Author’s Interview with Rochelle Davis, Illinois Healthy
School Campaign, July 9, 2004.

Healthy eating (1), making our own pesto

At Little Earth we have been learning how we can use our garden produce for our daily needs at preschool.  We like our morning and afternoon snack, especially with our own Little Earth bread which is made daily by the children.  We thought of how we can use our garden greens for our own spread. With so much parsley and coriander in our garden, pesto was the natural answer. 

This is how we make our own pesto.

Ingredients: a dash of salt, olive oil, cheese, sunflower seeds and coriander or parsley.

Gather coriander and parsley, sometimes peas, from the garden.

Then wash and stem them.

Feed the stalks to the guinea pigs.

Grate the cheese.

Pound the sunflower seeds.

Then add the oil, leaves, cheese, and a dash of salt.

Pound the ingredients together until the mixture is fine.

Delicious!

By becoming involved in the seasonal cycles of planting, growing, harvesting, and eating and sharing the food grown in our organic garden, the children are appreciating and developing an understanding of the natural world.  Engaging our children in practices, projects and ways of working that lead to a more sustainable future helps them to develop an understanding they have a shared responsibility for the environment and humanity and that we all play a part in the web of life.  

- Anja

Ground to Ground

Are you one of these people who needs a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, before you can even start thinking of the day ahead of you?  Or are you one of the many people who simply enjoy the pleasure of drinking a cuppa while catching up with a friend or relative.  Coffee has become one of the most popular beverages in the world with the world coffee consumption said to reach as high as 400 billion coffee cups a year.  As a non coffee drinker I have never thought much about “a good cuppa”, let alone think about the tons of coffee grounds that are produced on a daily basis and dumped in the local landfills.

According to the Ground to Ground initiative, approximately 20 grams of coffee grounds remains every time an espresso machine is used, which is then typically thrown into the bin, and ends up in landfill.  20 grams might not seem like a big amount, until you consider that 5000 lattes work out to about 100 kilos of used grounds, 50,000 lattes work out to about 1 tonne.  Think about the millions of people who stop into cafes or use an espresso machine at home at least once a day.  All those tens of millions of drinks make for many tonnes of landfill each and every day.

At Little Earth we have been learning that plants grow healthy in soil that is rich in nutrients.  We also know that nitrogen and carbon are some nutrients that plants need. When we make our compost we put lots of green matter and brown matter to make a yummy dirt for the plants.  Coffee grounds have a relatively high nitrogen content, making them an excellent “green” addition to the compost bin and a great offset against high carbon ‘brown’ additions such as leaves, straw, and cardboard.  They also happen to act like a slow release fertiliser when put directly into the soil, providing ongoing nitrogen input into the garden.  When applied to the soil coffee grounds will deter snails and slugs, while at the same time attract the very beneficial earthworm who just loves coffee!

What better way to reduce the amount of waste in our landfill and keep our garden healthy at the same time then using coffee grounds in our garden?  Coffee grounds have been used for compost and gardening for many centuries.  Our local coffee shop, BURST Drive-Thru-Café, delivers a bucket full of grounds every week to Little Earth.  The children sprinkle the coffee grounds on our veggie patches to ward of the slugs ad snails.  The leaves of our cauliflowers and cabbages are amazingly looking healthier, and no longer full of holes.  The children also sprinkle coffee around the other plants in the garden and around our native plants up the bank.  We also add coffee grounds to our compost and worm farm. It sure is a lot of fun spreading coffee grounds!

You may wonder why our garden smells like coffee sometimes?

We are learning that coffee ground is a good source of 
nitrogen for our soil.

We are also learning that coffee grounds keep snails and slugs away.

So now we are adding coffee grounds to our compost and garden.

What a great way to recycle coffee grounds and keep our garden healthy! And it is fun too!

Recycling coffee grounds would have to be one of the easiest ways to make a difference.  For more information about used coffee grounds and the Ground to Ground initiative, visit the Ground to Ground website.

Reusing coffee grounds in the garden is just one way of the plenty of usages it can have in a preschool.  More creative ideas about using coffee grounds tomorrow.

- Anja

What a Summer in the Garden!

Nau mai e nga hua e hora nei-
I ahu mai na koe it te poho o Papatuanuku
Mai i nga roimata aroha o Ranginui
Mai i nga hihi o Tananuitera
Tenei te aroha e rere nei
Enei kai


Welcome to the fruits that are spread before us
That have come from the bosom of our Earth Mother
From the tears of love of our sky father
From the energy light rays of the sun
This is the love that flows
This food.

We are very excited with our first harvest Season at Little Earth. Our garden has grown really well. All our efforts in taking care of our plants have paid off and we have had several harvests. In late Spring we harvested our iceberg lettuce and red lettuce and we made sure that everyone had something to take home to share with the family. A few days after our very first harvest, we noticed that we had got heaps of sugar snap peas, so we harvested them, too, and shared them for afternoon tea.

During Summer our garden was full of sunflowers, thriving lavender bushes (and bees)  and many other companion plants.

We are now in Autumn in Aotearoa, the season for harvesting, and we are certainly enjoying our garden bounty!

Harvesting is an exciting activity for the children as along with the actual harvesting comes scrubbing, chopping, arranging and serving.  The serving brings us together as a community and over the last few weeks we have enjoyed sharing tomatoes, beans, carrots and beetroot.

The abundance of beetroot forced us to be creative and adapt one of our favourite ‘5 cup loaf’ recipes to create a surprising edible loaf enjoyed by children and adults alike. The recipe calls for one cup of each of the following - self raising flour, brown sugar (we use less), milk, coconut - and then one cup of ‘anything’ which was where the beetroot and currants came in!  This particular concoction is very high in anti-oxidants, and the 5 cup loaf is an easy, versatile recipe to have on hand. 

We really are enjoying our garden’s bounty and we are learning a lot about  caring for the living things that produce our food. We take care of them and they take care of us.

Ngahuru, kura kai, kura tangata
Harvest time, wealth of food, the wealth of people.

- Anja

First day back

Today was our first day back at Little Earth after closing down for three weeks for our Summer break.  A festival of flowers awaited us.  These flowers have been planted as companion plants.  There are vegetables in there as well!  What a joy to come back too!

- Anja

Happiness of Mother Nature

Tawa Montessori started working with Enviroschools in 2007, and Little Earth joined in 2009. We have attended many cluster meetings, workshops, and huis, working with facilitators and networking with other enviroschools.  As mentioned in my post about the Enviroschools tribe, the support from Enviroschools has been crucial to our achievements.  Being part of a tribe enables us to share and learn from each other, and to combine others unique perspectives and gifts.

At Little Earth we received the Silver Award from Enviroschools during our recent end of year celebration evening.  This Silver Award is a huge achievement for our Little Earth community.  Only six months ago our outdoor area wouldn’t have been more than a patch of grass with a sand area.

We now have a thriving garden, a huge area for our animals to freely roam, a growing orchard, a potting shed for seedlings, compost and fertiliser juice stations, an obstacle course of natural objects, a natural exploring area, trees, flowers, natives and so on.  And there is much more to come!   All this could not have been achieved without the help of our Little Earth community; children, teachers and whanau. They have contributed not only lots of items, but gave generously their time to help develop our outdoor environment, all done with a catching enthusiasm and sheer joy.

We are proud to be an Enviroschool and we hope that we can continue this amazing journey, creating a community that cares for each other and the Earth. We hope you join us in 2011 in creating more natural environments and playscapes for our children.  May you all find plenty of time and space to celebrate the beauty, joy and happiness that Papatuanuku, Mother Nature, brings upon us.  

Happy New Year!
- Anja

If you want to read more about creating natural playscapes, Jenny from "Let the Children play" is writing a series of posts inspired by Rusty Keeler, creator of Earthplay and author of Natural Playscapes. Go here for her first post. Thank you for sharing this with us Jenny!