While doing my landscaping and vertical gardens for the Sharanalaya Montessori school, I had a lot of curious children wondering what I was up to. When the projects were done, the school suggested I conduct workshops for them to teach them first hand about sustainable practices. Having attended a school that taught me about sustainability young, I thought it would be great to mentor a new generation of children. After a little planning, our first sessions started in August of 2016.

This post covers the following sessions.

The first sessions we did was on a few basic experiments to understand how plants conduct water upwards and how air pressure works. This is the process we followed.

In this session the class made seed bombs for no till farming. The popularization of this technique is credited to the Japanese organic farmer, Masanobu Fukuoka. The technique involves mixing seeds with clay like soil to form a ball. All the conditions needed for the germination of the seed are met inside the clay ball, while protecting the seeds from damage by insects or weather. The balls are then scattered across a field. The seeds will germinate when provided water or when it rains. This also eliminates the need to plough the field which Fukuoka believed was highly energy intensive
and damaging to the soil. In an urban context, these seed bombs are being used by guerrilla gardeners to beautify abandoned plots around the city.

For our class we made seed bombs mixed with a variety of flower seeds from the next door nursery to start our own flower garden at the school. Children made and planted the balls themselves and were also responsible for looking after the garden.

For this session the class made Kimchi from scratch using a guide I'd made before.

In this session the class learnt how to dye garments using dye made from organic sources. The garments to be dyed are first prepared by soaking them for a couple of hours in a fixative solution of vinegar and water in equal rations.
This enables the dye to colour the cloth easily. For this class, dye was made by boiling cut pieces of beetroot in water for around an hour. The garments are then twisted and secured with rubber bands to form a simple tie and dye pattern. The garments are then placed in a pot containing the dye and boiled. Usually garments to be dyed are left in dye for upwards of three hours, sometimes even overnight. In this class, due to time constraints, we dyed our garments for only half an hour to demonstrate how the process works.

The last session before the holidays was a recap of everything we learnt where the class watched videos on the topics we covered.

I've never taught kids before, and it was an interesting experience. Kids have an energy and vibe a lot of us seem to lose as we grow older. There were times I'd ask a serious question, and a kid would raise his hand and say he knew the answer. I'd be like cool, what is it? He'll be like 'Fart!' and the whole class will laugh for 15 minutes straight. Being a little immature myself, I'd laugh along and the sessions would descend into chaos for awhile. I do however think they learnt a lot and most importantly had fun through these sessions. I asked them to bring a change of clothes for our mud based sessions and they took that as an opportunity to cover themselves head to toe in dirt. The janitors were filled with dread whenever I came by to do an outdoors session as the kids basically decimated the bathrooms while cleaning up. We did however start hosing down kids outdoors after several complaints from the cleaning staff. The school knew I was a novice teacher and so kindly allocated only 4 -5 kids to me at a time so I could manage them. The school is a Montessori school and children from different ages, from 6 to 10 attended these sessions. The school was not very disciplinary and I have to say the initial few sessions were rough because the kids were like sharks that smelt gullible blood. They did however warm up to me as soon as they figured out we would be having practical fun and not only learning theory. Time will tell if I made a difference, but I think it's important to get the younger generation exposure to this kind of knowledge. They are the future after all. I benefited immensely from my education, and this was my may of giving back to support and encourage sustainable living.