Growing is an effective vehicle for educational therapy. A child’s learning weaknesses can be turned into strengths with the right intervention. This can be done in the following ways.
The first step is to identify what the barriers are. This can be done by focussing on an individual’s abilities and recognising their challenges. This creates opportunities develop and reach personal potential.
Emotional and cognitive barriers are interrelated and can be tricky to untangle. For example, barriers related to concentration and focus are closely related to thought patterns generated by belief systems, which are based on values. Intellectual ability is not the concern but rather problems with concentration and focus. As most teachers will probably agree ‘naughty’ children are often very intelligent. The most common example to illustrate this a child who loses concentration when they find a task too challenging. Deeply ingrained beliefs can result to a learning attitudes that will impact a child’s ability to concentrate and focus. This is when the skill of learning to learn can be an effective tool.
The process of learning to learn is very important, Dr. Mathew Cruger director of the Child Mind Institute’s Learning and Development Centre states, ‘One of the biggest struggles that characterises almost all of the kids I see is they don’t know how to think about how to do work in an organised way”. A child’s ability to start start a project or to break down a homework task is central to to develop skills for lifelong learning.Learning to learn is also an effective was to empower children as they will be able to transfer this skill to a plethora of different environments and subjects.
When gardening and growing children will be able to build a base of knowledge around a practical task. This process will help teachers an parents to recognise underlying learning issues, by analysing a child’s reactions and comments. Gardening will provide a safe environment for educators to identify where a child feels uncomfortable and how they react to that uncertainty or learning challenge. Furthermore growing provides sufficient opportunity for educators to help develop strategies to to improve concentration memory and attention.
Furthermore they will be able to transfer that process to other areas of learning, as well as the sense of accomplishment. For many the first step would be to identify the challenge(s) a child may be experiencing in their ability to learn. The challenge maybe related to concentration and focus, not intellectual ability. The next step would be to see the different methods available and to use those methods to build a robust plan that can help build a child’s strengths in an incremental and safe way.