Jalaris Kids Future Club Garden Project
In 2009 Jalaris Aboriginal Corporation started a garden project as part of their Kids Future Club program. Side by Side & Jalaris on ways to use video and photography to evaluate the kids experiences of the garden project as part of an ongoing evaluation of the Kids Future Club.
Once the wet season ended and the cooler weather started in March, Jalaris commenced the garden project. This involved staff doing the heavy work of digging and fertilising the garden beds and installing reticulation first, and then teaching the kids how to plant the beds with a variety of vegetables and herbs: corn, tomato, watermelon, lettuce, pumpkin, silver beet, capsicum, basil etc. They have also planted orange, lime, fig and lemon trees. Click on the following link to see a video of the kids planting tomatoes, videoed by one of the kids club members…
The project is linked to health and nutrition through supporting kids to learn about growing and eating vegies and doing physical activity in the process, as well as literacy and numeracy by getting the kids to record what they have planted, how many they have planted, why they are healthy, how fast they are growing, and to document the progress of the project with photographs, video and drawings. This is a long term project, and Jalaris is motivating the kids to persevere with it by offering a prize of a laptop computer for the best efforts by the kids at the end of the year. Below are photos of the garden project in August, as well as when it began back in March 2009.
Below are some pictures of the garden and the kids at work and play (click on each to see it enlarged).
-
- Digging a new bed
-
- Thyisandra and Dayshia planting fig
-
- weeding lettuce and tomato patches
-
- Tending the fig tree
-
- working on the educational computer
-
- boys on trampoline
[...] We’ve used video in a variety of ways. The kids have access to a little digi cam that can take MPEG4 videos, and they are encouraged to video activities at the club, including daily interactions. Every now and then we’ve set them a specific task – to video a guided tour of the kids club for example, or to video a specific activity that’s going on. This material helps us to see what the kids like to do, how they interact with the space and the activities, and to represent the experience of the Kids Club from the kid’s own points of view. Click here to see a recent video from a gardening activity at the club. [...]