Gardening experience of fifth graders and its impact on their attitude towards home produced vegetables

In the history of Slovenian education the school garden represented an important part of the lessons: it was a classroom in the nature, where through direct contact with nature students learned about the plants, they learned how to cultivate gardens and how to grow diffferent crops, which they then used in the kitchen. In today's increasingly virtual world children spend less spare time outside, which also affects their gardening experience and consequently their attitude towards home produced vegetables. Some children do not even know anymore where the food that they daily have on their plates comes from. An important role in connecting pupils to nature and taking into considering our ancestors' practices is played by the Slovenian program Šolski ekovrt, which tries to encourage the creation of school ecological gardens throughout Slovenia and integrate them into everyday lessons. Changes are also happening in the school system as the updated school curriculum requires performing activities that encourage education for sustainable development. In the master's thesis we used the questionnaire to explore the fifth-graders' experience in gardening, to learn where did they acquire it and how does the experience with gardening affect their attitude towards home produced vegetables. The research showed that rural children have more experience with most of the gardening activities (raking, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting and cleaning) than urban children. We also found that the higher amount of experience with gardening has a positive impact on the students' attitude towards home produced vegetables, which could lead to making gardening a compulsory subject in primary schools. This way all students (particularly ones from urban environments) would be able to get the chance of being in the genuine and direct contact with nature