Impatien to start the group!

Week 1 of Connect: Gardening

Spring has sprung, which is the perfect opportunity to start a brand new connect group, Connect: Gardening! This is my first time volunteering for a Connect group, and I could not be more excited for many reasons. First of all, I work at BigsNBC and volunteer as an In-School Mentor, and I enjoy it so much that I just had to get involved in a group! Secondly, I love gardening! Over the next 5 weeks, our group of 5 kids will be meeting and doing all kinds of fun activities. Not only will this group teach the kids valuable gardening skills that they can use at home, but they will also get to participate in lots of creative and fun projects as well.

This week, we started the group off by doing a Painting & Planting activity! For this, the kids got to learn how to plant a flower in a pot, and they used beautiful Impatiens! After this, the kids got to paint their flower pots in any way that they liked. In pairs, BigsNBC Coordinator, Amy, took the kids and taught them how to take the flower out of the packaging and plant it into the soil they placed in the pot beforehand. Once they were planted, they got to choose from an assortment of vibrant colours to paint their pots. There were all kinds of lovely patterns and designs that the kids painted, which made each of their pots unique. Once they were all done painting, they got to put some shiny rocks on the top of the soil to add some decoration.

During the group, we chatted about lots of fun topics like what the kids did for the May long weekend, the May Fair, and end-of-the-school-year field trips. We had lots of familiar faces but also some new ones, so it was awesome to get to know each other in this first group, and also share some laughs!

Stay tuned for next week when the group will be making Fairy/Gnome Gardens – I am so excited!

May 23, 2023

-Jael, BigsNBC Volunteer