Our Rainbow Garden

Written by: Kirsty

We are lucky that we have such a beautiful outside space and as teachers we have always used the environment as the third teacher. With such a glorious hot summer, upon returning to Preschool in early 2022, we noticed that some of outside garden beds and plants were looking a little sad and in need of some aroha. The sunflower garden had withstood the hot sun and lack of water, but most other areas hadn’t fared so well in these conditions.

We had taken the opportunity to talk to some of the Kowhai children about our outside spaces and invited them to tell us how we could make the environment more inviting. With a little bit of brain storming, the children came up with what they wanted, and this included a ‘herbal garden’ and a garden with flowers of lots of different colours, this latter concept having become known as ‘Our Rainbow Garden’. In order to take the children’s ideas of the ‘Rainbow Garden’ to the next stage, we sourced some books and read the children some stories that featured rainbows. The children on several occasions during our Investigation times were invited to paint and draw their own rainbows.

The evolving ‘Rainbow Garden’ ideas were discussed with the children and the teaching team, and after our collaborative discussions we settled on two designs that we could adopt that would suit the two garden planter boxes, mirroring the shape of rainbows. Stella helped with the initial pencil outline of each design on two pieces of A3, one in an arc shape and one in diagonals. Each child then added to the design by colouring in sections of our plan.

The children identified the 7 coloured plants that we needed – red, yellow, orange, green, blue, indigo and violet ,and the plants were purchased. Planting out our planter boxes following the plans was the next stage and what a great job everyone did taking great care to plant their

As a continuation, we also planted out our two hanging baskets and the pallets that sit above the sand pit, both which followed our rainbow investigations themes. The pallets taking on a row of each rainbow colour, with the green trees and foliage in our neighbour’s garden, being the backdrop and the green representation element of the rainbow. The concepts of mixing colours and what happens when light hits crystals evolved from these Investigation times. These exploration of these ideas were further looked into through the range of experiments Colleen and Summer introduced, these included experiments with flowers, milk, oil, and painting with ice blocks to name a few.

The children also enjoyed some music and movement, playing with our colourful parachute and learning the song ‘It’s A Rainbow”. The children’s learning was further enhanced with our coloured ribbons which tie in nicely and are used in an interactive basis every time they sing the song. As the year continues we are all looking after our outside spaces and gardens by watering, replanting, weeding and showing respect to our environment and each other. We regularly ask questions and encourage the children to share what existing knowledge they have with regards to the essential elements that are required in order to grown and sustain healthy plants.