Herb Garden Smell Hello

A routine rather than an activity. On the way into the garden, the child crushes a leaf from each of four pots and smells it.

Run daily, this becomes a threshold ritual. The children know where the garden begins because their hands smell of it. It also gives you four plants that every child in the group can recognise blind by the end of a term, which sounds like a small achievement until a parent tells you their two year old identified lemongrass in a supermarket.

We use lemongrass, mint, basil and pandan. All four are cheap, fast growing, safe, and available anywhere in Southeast Asia.

The sheet has the pot layout, the growing notes, and the twenty second sequence. Keep the pots at the child's height. Ours were on a bench for a year and the routine never took until we moved them down.