We grow more than plants at BestStart Birkdale! With the help of a kind parent, our tamariki got their hands dirty, planting seedlings and learning about care, community, and connection—one small garden patch at a time.
At BestStart Birkdale, one of the key areas of our foundation or Whakapapa is to create strong partnerships with our parents. Since parents are the key people from whom our tamariki learn about relationships and trust, we believe in engaging our parents actively in our learning programme.
Today, we had Mr Satyendra Singh, one of our beloved dads, who very kindly offered to do some gardening with our preschool tamariki to extend the current learning focus in our class.
Since gardening helps develop a sense of belonging, responsibility, and love in children from an early age, we’ve been encouraging our tamariki to grow their own little garden. We started with baby steps, planting some strawberries in a small patch of our playground a couple of weeks ago. But the children’s interest continued to grow—especially around caring for and watering the plants—so we decided to build on that interest.
Mr Singh, who loves gardening in his spare time, generously offered his time and brought in some wonderful seedlings to plant with our tamariki this morning. The enthusiasm and engagement from the children was incredible!
Tamariki asked questions about different plants and helped with planting so happily. We felt extremely grateful, as a community of learners, to create such a small but meaningful learning opportunity for our tamariki.
We believe in nurturing Papatuanuku to build strong bonds of love and whanaungatanga within our environment.