Gardening

Work is a purposeful activity that may include physical and mental effort to perform a task, overcome an obstacle, or achieve a desired outcome. AHI promotes physical activities through work at school, such as gardening. Gardening provides opportunities for increasing scientific knowledge and understanding, and improving literacy and numeracy, pupils’ confidence, resilience and self-esteem. It gives children a sense of responsibility, and fosters positive behaviour, particularly for those with behavioural and learning difficulties. Furthermore, this physical activity helps to keep the school a healthier place to learn, in addition to contributing to the 60 minutes of required physical exercise per day. Ideally, the school should introduce these practices during school hours. If not possible, this activity may be run after school hours. Gardening is a good alternative where physical education classes are a required school subject and classes may not occur temporarily due to different challenges, including a lack of physical education teacher at school. AHI advises a garden activity of 45 minutes twice a week. Gardening involves growing vegetables and flowers. It can be pretty simple if you boil it down to the basics. Easy-to grow vegetables include early potatoes (grow quickly and fun to dig); beetroot; pumpkins (lots of character); cherry tomatoes (the easiest type to grow and eat); peas (delicious straight from the pod); rainbow chard (very colourful); and fast-growing salad vegetables. Gardening tools are required for this activity.