Little Garden
School Kit Little Garden League teaching kids how to grow seeds into plants
Partners
New World & School Kit
Country
New Zealand
Year
2020
In 2020, New World Little Garden made it to schools across New Zealand.
With more than 3,000 classes taking part in the Little Garden curriculum-based School Kit, our campaign taught 104,000 children how to grow seeds into plants.
See the
case video
How Little Garden landed in New Zealand classrooms
From playful customer rewards…
Little Garden is a popular supermarket promotion that New World and UNGA have run together in 2016, 2017 and 2020. Every time, the campaign and its focus on sustainability have won families’ hearts.
Little Garden is a playful and fun initiative that helps children learn more about where food comes from and how plants grow. So, when UNGA and New World teamed up to run a third edition of the Little Garden loyalty campaign, the following question was raised: How can Little Garden benefit even more children in New Zealand?
To this end, New World started a new initiative and invited each of the nation’s 143 stores to donate at least one Little Garden kit to their local school. Additionally, the retailer partnered with School Kit who has a network of teachers around New Zealand. They created beautiful Little Garden teaching resources for classrooms all over the country.
… to valuable teaching resources
“After hours of research into healthy eating, we came up with an idea for how it could work in schools, and we created The Little Garden League,” explains Kylie Power, Inventor and School Visitor at School Kit. “Teachers just loved it,” continues Kylie. “It took the concept of healthy eating and made it exciting for teachers to use in their classrooms, as well as having the physical items to support this teaching. Months later, we are still getting requests for this kit!”
As the testimonials below show, teachers indeed adored the Little Garden League kit. “Our favourite was when a teacher told us that for the class shared lunch, instead of chippies, sausages and biscuits, the kids all decided they wanted to have a vegetable shared lunch… Unheard of!” shared Kylie.
Head of Marketing and CX at New World, Pippa Prain, also explained that Little Garden is all about putting a commitment to sustainability into practice. “Little Garden is a fantastic way to help the next generation learn more about where their food comes from and get a real taste of what it takes to grow fresh produce.”
Powerful teaching and learning experiences for both teachers and students
24 seedlings to grow a Little Garden at school
The program was specially designed to make learning about vegetables and why they’re good for you, fun and accessible. The benefit of sending teachers a Little Garden School Kit means that they had everything they needed arrive in their classroom on a given day, as well as all the support they require in the classroom.
With the seedling kits, teachers and children could grow 17 vegetables, 5 herbs and 2 types of flowers. Each Little Garden kit had all the components brought to New World by UNGA:
- A seed tape
- A compostable pot
- A soil pod
- A pop-out name tag
- Basic instructions to grow plants with love.
To that, School Kit added an amazing Little Garden League story that would embark the students on a green adventure.
The Little Garden League
The plot around School Kit’s Little Garden League made it fun and immediately had children interested in gardening and healthy food:
“A long time ago, the very existence of vegetables on this planet came under threat. People everywhere had forgotten how good vegetables tasted and how good they were for you. Even worse, they had started forgetting how to grow them. So, 24 brave individuals went underground, each vowing to protect the future of the seedling they carried with them. The Little Garden League was born.”
New Little Garden League members promised to grow, protect and taste vegetables in a quest for a healthier life. Each new member received a Pledge Card, a Membership Badge and a seedling. In order to be a part of the Little Garden League, students also had to apply and pass the official membership test.
Ultimately, 3,250 teachers and 104,000 students joined in to “Make a pledge to the veg’.” Children needed to keep their seedlings safe and learned about looking after them with water, sunlight and care every day.
What did teachers think of School Kit Little Garden?
★★★★★
The Little Garden at Clayton Parl School – Te Pihinga Year 2-4
Kia ora School Kit Whanau My Cherubs and I had a great learning experience with this kit. Everyday tamariki observed its growth, everyday they had wonderings, everyday great discussions happened around the little garden.
★★★★★
The Little Garden Club
Beautiful kit with engaging resources and perfectly explained teaching sequence. Really easy to implement into our programme and follow up at home with the New World link. Definitely recommend to other teachers. The children fully engaged with the resource, even though some had only just started school. The level was appropriate and the learning was clear.
★★★★★
Little Garden Learning – Fabulous Fun!
This was a great springtime kit. The children loved planting and caring for their ‘Little Garden’. The materials and resources were a great hook to get the class motivated. This has a great link to our Enviroschool and to our ‘Garden to Plate’. The badges were worn proudly and the league was very desirable! So much learning in this kit, we know what lots of plants look like, how to care for them and what they taste like.
★★★★★
Little Garden League!
Just an awesome professionally curated resource! My year 3 and 4 students loved the whole thing and especially loved the badges and memberships!! The kids LOVED seeing their seeds sprout and there were shrieks of excitement when their particular pot started to sprout! Thank you very much! The kids just love getting their own little thing to take away: the seedling pot, the badge (one of my students was still wearing it months later), etc.
— Source: schoolkit.co.nz
“We had really amazing parent feedback with huge support for the programme. They commented that it made dinner time so much easier to try vegetables.”
Kylie Power
Inventor and School Visitor
School Kit
About School Kit
School Kit is a teacher network that creates beautiful resources, made up of both physical and digital items, for New Zealand classrooms.
The kits result in powerful teaching and learning experiences for both teachers and their students.
A bespoke Little Garden League Kit has been created for children aged 5-8 to align curriculum lessons in Healthy Eating, Writing, Technology, Science, Art & Word recognition.
About New World
New World is a New Zealand supermarket chain and counts 143 stores nationwide. It is a part of Foodstuffs, a proudly 100% New Zealand owned and operated organization made up of two regional co-operatives.
New World knows that it makes people happy when they get together with friends and family over food. That’s why New World stores are created to deliver the best overall shopping experience, to completely meet shoppers’ needs with the best possible range of groceries and fresh food, top quality, excellent customer service, and great value for money.
