“I have found meditation really helpful in my personal life, and it has benefited my work greatly as I can tune in to certain mindful aspects of my work with the children to make gardening an enjoyable and calming experience.”
(Manon Webb ~ Children’s Garden Club Organiser)
Manon is a Ceredigion-based practitioner who discovered the benefits of mindfulness after injuring her knee and experiencing reduced mobility. Meditation became a coping strategy and led her to enjoy going on short retreats and exploring Buddhist ethics.
She now runs a pre-school gardening club with children aged between 2 and 4 and offers a gardening session inside an after-school club for children aged from 4 to 11. In these sessions Manon experiments with different ways of informally introducing mindfulness both practically and relationally.
On a practical level, she encourages the children to notice the natural world around them, and devises activities to support their understanding of interconnection. One such activity was a trip to the beach to collect seaweed which was then made into a natural fertiliser for the garden. The children take part in many aspects of gardening and Manon tracks their ‘learning journeys’, linking them to the national curriculum. She backs their learning up with personal quotes from them so that their parents/carers can be aware of, and enjoy, the progress of their child.
On a relational level, Manon knows that her state of mind and way of being has a direct impact on how the children interact with each other and how they learn about gardening. She is aware that their brains are still strongly neuro-plastic and are therefore easily influenced by key adults in their lives.
She sees her time with them as a good opportunity to teach them how to nurture the garden and have respect and care for all living creatures such as insects. Through incorporating mini mindfulness experiments they are directly experiencing the relationship between moments of pausing and noticing more in their environment:
“One time, the children in the after-school club discovered a blue tit nest and we were watching the bird fly into the hole in the wall to feed the chicks. When we really listened, we could hear the chicks really distinctly which the children absolutely loved.”
Through her time offering these sessions, Manon has noticed that the children have become calmer and more focused. She has seen them show amazing enthusiasm and curiosity towards all aspects of gardening. Some children who have had difficulty in regulating their emotions have become more empathetic, tuning into the garden more and are being gentler with the plants and insects, as well as with each other.
Manon is keen to continue weaving mindfulness into her gardening sessions, and has future plans for the gardening clubs to continue, and to fundraise for a polytunnel, to expand the opportunities for learning together.
Manon Webb – manonwebbb@gmail.com