Specialist

EWP News

🌱 Engaging with Place, Garden Discovery & Outdoor Learning - A Term of Growth 🌱

This term at St Gabriel’s, students have been immersed in rich learning through Engaging with Place, with a special focus on National Sorry Day and the 2025 Reconciliation Week theme: Bridging Now to Next.

Across all year levels, students have been thinking deeply about place through time, exploring how places are connected to the past, how we live in and care for them in the present, and how we can protect and honour them into the future. Their learning has been thoughtful and meaningful, with students asking deep questions, making cultural connections, and reflecting on what reconciliation truly means.

At the same time, our Garden Discovery sessions have flourished! With the guidance of our wonderful grandparent volunteer Robyn, who visits every two weeks, students have planted out all of our garden beds. We’re now growing cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, silverbeet, kale, broccoli and leeks - a great winter crop nurtured by many eager young hands. The garden continues to be a space of wonder, responsibility and connection to place.

Adding even more excitement to our outdoor spaces is our brand-new mud kitchen.

Already, this new addition is inspiring creativity, collaboration and joyful play. In the mud kitchen, students mix, pour, stir and invent - using natural materials to role-play, create recipes, build imaginary worlds and explore science concepts through hands-on experimentation.

Mud kitchens support:

• Imaginative play
• Language development
• Social skills and cooperation
• Sensory exploration
• Early STEM thinking
• Connection to nature

Outdoor learning experiences like these nurture curiosity, creativity and care for the world around us, reminding us that some of the richest learning happens when hands, hearts and minds are all engaged.

What a powerful term of growth, learning and connection it’s been - both in the classroom and outdoors!

Engaging With Place Recipes