Durham PreK Educators get their Hands Dirty
April 4, 2024
As an early childhood educator, you help build the academic foundations for young learners. Alongside feeding their growing minds, it is also vital to ensure that your students are being taught how to feed their growing bodies by eating well and living a healthy lifestyle. What better way to do that than to introduce them to gardening?
Introducing gardening to children early in life teaches them about their nutrition and encourages them to enjoy eating healthy foods. It also keeps children physically active with responsibilities such as planting, weeding, and watering the garden. A great resource and support for the overall nutrition, health, and wellness of children are programs like Shaping Healthy Lives.
Shaping Healthy Lives (SHL) aims to reduce childhood obesity and increase physical activity in children ages birth-5 years at early childhood education programs in Durham. SHL’s goal is to help child care centers and family child care homes (FCCHs) provide opportunities so children may, regardless of their family’s circumstances, succeed and enter kindergarten healthy and active.
SHL supports health and education by promoting healthy eating and active play in young children at their child care center or FCCH, where many children eat 50-100 percent of their meals for the day. SHL uses research-based models to provide an in-depth approach to childhood obesity prevention.
Through SHL, Child Care Services Association (CCSA) works with participating child care centers and FCCHs to assess their need to increase physical activity, improve children's meals, engage families in the process, and enhance the materials provided to children to support these goals.
By integrating areas of best practice related to nutrition, physical activity, and enhanced outdoor learning environments, participating sites may help ease children’s food insecurity and reduce their risk for future obesity. SHL has demonstrated it affects even more children and families over time, because teacher and parent knowledge gained during the project creates healthy habits in current children and future cohorts of children in the centers and in their homes.
SHL is open for all child care providers to apply at the beginning of each fiscal year pending grant approval. In mid July, there will be a google link sent to all the child care centers and homes in Durham. For questions or more information, contact our Quality Enhancement Coach, Swanda Warren at swandaw@childcareservices.org.
In addition to SHL encouraging children to live healthy and play, preschoolers can also learn about nutrition and gardening in the classroom through another great support, Creative Curriculum!
The Creative Curriculum is an early childhood curriculum that focuses on project-based investigations as a means for children to apply skills and address four areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language. The project-based investigations are called studies.
Creative Curriculum has a "garden study" that brings the garden to the classroom. Children benefit from abundant opportunities for hands-on exploration and discovery as they grow and taste nutritious produce, see the rainbow of colors that different plants create, and share their harvest with the community.
Check out how some of our Durham PreK sites are “digging” into a healthy and nutritious future, and using gardening to bolster family engagement!
Growing Legacy Early Learning Center
The young gardeners at Growing Legacy Early Learning Center are being taught how to grow nutritious and delicious veggies and herbs such as collards, kale, lettuce, rosemary, tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, and cabbage.
In honor of their beautiful garden, they will be having a Garden Day event on Friday, April 19th from 10:00 - 11:00 am, where they will do a Planting with the Parents activity for the preschoolers. At the event, they will also provide fresh seasonal fruits and veggies to the families at their center!
Kiddie Kollege
Kiddie Kollege is promoting a healthy lifestyle to their families, neighbors, and visitors by providing delicious veggies and herbs such as tomatoes, peppers, basil, carrots, rainbow carrots, squash, melon cucumbers, cabbage, spinach, kale, beans, rosemary, mint, and edible flowers.
They are hosting a Gardening Day event and teaching students different gardening skills and techniques such as planting, weeding, and spreading mulch.
Creative Schools at Davis Park
Creative Schools at Davis Park is starting a garden this Spring. How exciting! As an opportunity for family engagement, families can donate plants toward the garden. They are planning to have tasty fruits, veggies, and herbs such as strawberries, blackberries, cucumbers, squash, peppers, lettuce, thyme, rosemary, and mint leaves. Beautiful flowers will be added to the garden too.
They plan on hosting a family picnic once the fresh produce is here!
Incorporating gardening, which increases healthy living, physical activity, play, and developmental skills is beneficial to any preschool classroom. What are your young gardeners up to? Let us know by emailing us at durhamprek@childcareservices.org so we can share your garden creations. Happy Spring!