A once bare patch of garden at Bilambil Public School is now sprouting with the beginnings of a delicious vegetable patch.
The school’s two kindergarten classes, KJ and KP, have planted a wide assortment of vegetables and flowers in their new garden after local residents Beth and Lyndon Block won the seedlings as a prize and decided to donate them to the school.
The garden is full with snow peas, beans, tomatoes, capsicums and Spanish onions, as well as colourful sunflowers, pansies, primroses and begonias.
Teacher Julie Smith said the 5-year-olds had an enormous amount of fun carrying the soil for their garden bed in tiny beach buckets before planting the seedlings and were now keenly watching their growth.
“It teaches them about nurturing things from something little so they can see it grows and changes. They love it,” she said.
“But it also ties in other aspects of the curriculum such as maths, with exercises such as estimating whether the pile of soil was getting bigger or smaller as they took bucket loads away.”
Once grown, the vegetables will be tasted and offered to the school canteen.
Growing vegetables also reinforces Bilambil Public School’s Crunch and Sip policy which has been operating at the school for the last few years to support students to establish healthy eating habits.
Crunch and Sip is a set break all students are offered each day to eat fruit or salad vegetables and drink water in the classroom.
