The experience of nurturing
Can be a powerful nurture of learning

The process of raising vegetables from seed and harvesting and cooking the results can seem perfectly ordinary, but a surprising number of children have never had this experience. Life Seed Labo focuses on giving these children the chance to take a closer look at eating, the basis of life. For children who might have trouble sitting at a desk in front of a textbook, the experience of touching the soil and gripping a knife expands their curiosity and nurtures their ability to learn.
This requires no textbooks. If children have questions about the vegetables they’re raising, or want to keep a record of their observations, tablets are used.
Everything they encounter, in the field or in the kitchen, is a target for new learning.
“During one harvest, a child was attempting to pull up some lettuce when he spotted an insect that was busily eating one of the leaves. The child couldn’t take his eyes away. He didn’t get much work done, but using his tablet, he could observe to his heart’s content just how the insect eats and try to understand the underlying ecology.”
By coming face-to-face with the natural world, which can’t be explained simply through words and pictures, children can take their fill of knowledge in whatever direction their interests and curiosity leads them. That learning is not restricted to science.
Making soy milk requires soy beans.
So, how many soy beans does it take to make one glass of soy milk?
“Let’s try counting to see how much 1,000 soy beans come to.”
“A thousand soy beans?!”
The children let out a cry at the sight of so many soy beans. Someone suggested they start by carefully counting how many soy beans would fit in a small box, then figure out how many boxes would come to 1,000 soy beans.
“I never understood why we need multiplication, but now I get it,” said one child.
All of a sudden, boring mathematics started to get interesting, and the children began earnestly counting soy beans.
Making pizza, they learned the principles of fermentation, and how preserving foods makes it impossible for bacteria to survive. They also learned how methods for preserving foods for the winter, when food was scarce, evolved into modern canning and freeze drying technologies, and how test versions of preserved foods of the future are eaten by astronauts in outer space. The number of stories surrounding food is vast.