Without stating the obvious (it’s a whole lot of fun), gardening has countless benefits for foster children, including strengthening relationships with food and building self-esteem. Getting outside and gardening means a healthy dose of vitamin D, fresh air, exercise, and enjoyment. To find out more, continue reading below.
A Fun, Shared Experience
When you’re receiving training from orangegrovefostercare.co.uk, you will learn about the role of shared experiences in building positive relationships with foster children. Getting out in the garden means getting messy, and children love that. Whether they’re digging to plant seeds, messing about with the water hose, searching for bugs, or making mud pies, your foster children will enjoy being out in the garden and they’ll create long-lasting memories.
Picking Up New Skills
Gardening presents the perfect opportunity for your foster children to learn new skills, and it won’t cost a lot either. For example, digging and planting seeds promotes the use of both hands, which develops fine motor skills. As well as this, they can learn to understand the circle of life and how important it is to protect it – a lesson that will be helpful forever.
Great Health and Fitness Opportunity
Exercise and eating plenty of fruit and vegetables are essential for keeping healthy, and it’s your job to ensure your foster children are getting enough. A great way to do this is through gardening, which can be quite the workout on its own – burning energy is always a bonus.
While you’re in the garden, you can grow herbs and vegetables, which will help your foster children to form a healthy relationship with food. After all, eating a radish or carrot grown in the garden is much more appealing than buying them off the supermarket shelves.
Building Lifelong Passions
Ongoing projects, like maintaining the garden, allow you to introduce a fun activity to their routine. This is important because foster children need routines to allow them to heal, feel secure, and flourish. While they’re getting into the garden during the whole year, they’re picking up healthy hobbies that will last a lifetime.
Gardening can also help promote other passions including DIY. For example, during the winter, some plants will need protection, so you can build a DIY greenhouse to see them through to spring.
Teaching Sustainability
The world has become much more aware of how important it is to protect our planet, which is why sustainable lifestyles are becoming much more appealing. You can start educating your foster children about sustainability by inviting them to engage in garden-based activities. For example, you can make a DIY rainwater barrel to recycle water that can be used to help plants grow. As well as this, you can teach them about dealing with troublesome weeds without using chemicals.
Spending quality time with foster children is the key to unlocking the door to trust and a stronger relationship, and gardening is the perfect activity to do this and so much more. The skills and lessons learned through gardening will stay with your foster children forever, and they’ll have implications in so many different areas of their lives.
