Empowering tamariki to grow, harvest, prepare, and share great food.
Would you like to start a garden at your school, but you're not sure how to start? Or maybe you need some help integrating learning about soil, plants and healthy eating into your curriculum?
Garden to Table is a food education programme that enables schools and kura across Aotearoa to take learning out of the classroom, and into the garden and kitchen – where tamariki are empowered to grow, harvest, prepare and share fresh, seasonal, and environmentally sustainable food.
This has a transformative and lifelong impact on the health and hauora - wellbeing of students, their whānau, and the world around them. By connecting the kaupapa of grow, harvest, prepare, and share, the Garden to Table programme is highly practical and child-centric, supporting students to learn to work together. The theme of “kids doing everything” is a key component of the sessions; skills are not watered down for tamariki and they learn to operate in the kitchen and garden as they would at home, with careful observation and guidance.
Garden to Table schools have access to a range of curriculum-linked resources, including the recently released The Invisible World of Soil | Te Ao Tē Kitea i te Kōpū o Papatūānuku. The integration of practical and critical thinking skills which are linked to learning across a range of subjects means that teachers are equipped to take teaching out of the classroom and into the garden and kitchen, where the language of Maths, Science, Arts, and English, emerge naturally.
Inspiring Stories
Turua School and the Giant Pumpkins
Garden to Table tamariki on the Hauraki Plains got their whole community involved in growing and celebrating really big pumpkins, with the seed of an idea now growing into an annual event. Click on the title above to read the full story.
“We were super pleased to have school families growing pumpkins who usually never grew vegetables or gardened,” says Anikha Sanders, the garden specialist for the school’s Garden to Table programme.
Wesley School in Mount Roskill
Wesley’s programme has grown from strength to strength, and today, the benefits flow back into the broader community - bringing tamariki, and their whānau together for rich learning and meaningful experiences. Click on the title above to read the full story.
Young Sulia says that she loves watering the plants “so they can grow big and we can eat them for lunch”.
