Encourage a love of nature with these garden activities for young kids. Perfect for preschool, kindergarten, and elementary aged kids! From making observations to making your own DIY projects!
Gardens are a magical place filled with exciting things to explore. Share your love of the garden with your child with these engaging activities.
As an avid gardener who has been growing flowers and vegetables since I was little, I had so much fun putting together this list.
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Skills to Practice
- Building Community
- Communication
- Comparing and Contrasting
- Fine Motor Skills
- Gross Motor Skills
- Making Observations
- Patience
- Problem Solving
- Taking Care of Living Things
A garden is a wonderful classroom for both adults and children. Even a small garden made of a few containers on a balcony is filled with learning opportunities.
From fine motor skills, think of picking flowers and planting seeds, to gross motor skills including shoveling and digging up old plants.
Together you can practice communication as you plan and discuss what is happening in the garden. Along with learning the importance of taking care of living things.
You can even build community with these garden activities. From talking about growing conditions with fellow gardeners to sharing your harvest with those around you!
Topics to Explore
- Arts and Crafts
- Changing Seasons
- Characteristics of Animals
- Characteristics of Plants
- Life Cycle of an Insect
- Life Cycle of Plant
- Needs of Living Things
- Temperature
Naturally, science topics come to mind when exploring the garden together. Topics including the life cycle of plants and animals along with learning about the plants you are growing.
These activities also integrate arts and crafts as your child uses their creativity to create unique garden art.
Observing
The garden is filled with plants, animals, and changes that your child can observe.
Bring along a magnifying lens, container, camera, and ruler if you want to turn it into a formal lesson. Or just head outside together and see what you can find without having a set plan in place!
Not sure where to start, the lists below are filled with ideas to get you started!
Top Tip
Bring along a magnifying lens or field microscope for making observations. Bug containers are also fun to take along.
With your Eyes:
- New growth
- Different colored flowers
- Colorful vegetables
- Leaves in different shapes
- Insects pollinating flowers
- Direction of the sun's rays
- Bugs visiting plants
Through Listening:
- Different bird songs- see if you can identify any of the birds
- Buzzing of bees and other insects
- Water falling on leaves
- Shovel moving dirt
- Wind moving through leaves
Stopping and taking time to just be in the garden is a very rewarding experience. I love placing a chair in the garden and sitting on the edge of a raised bed. It's amazing what you can observe when you stop and listen.
As the season progresses, it is fun to notice the difference in sounds in the garden. Early in the spring you can hear spring peepers while during the heat of summer the buzz of heat loving insects.
By Touch
- Feel of different plants' leaves
- Texture of the soil
- Rough and smooth rocks
- Cool water from a hose
Through Smell
- Leaves of different herbs
- Flower blooms
- Freshly worked soil
- Air after it rain
- Vegetables growing
If you have ever grown tomatoes then you know that the entire plant smells like a tomato! I love growing them in my garden, just so I can enjoy the aroma.
By Taste
Growing fruits and vegetables in the garden is both fun and rewarding! Everything always tastes better when its grown right in the garden.
- Ripe Fruit- raspberries, blueberries, and apples
- Freshly picked vegetables- lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peas
- Herbs- basil is very easy to grow even from seed
Safety first, only eat plants that you know are safe to eat and have properly identified. Vegetables including cherry tomatoes, snap peas and carrots and fun for kids to grow and snack on!
Remember, you don't have to grow everything in your garden. Visit local green spaces, orchards, and town gardens. Even a neighbor's garden is great place to visit.
Compare and Contrast
One of the easiest activities is to compare and contrast things in the garden.
If you are looking closely at plants and animals in the garden, naturally you will start to notice differences between each item. You can prompt your child to take a closer look by choosing two objects to look at.
Digging in a few inches of soil and you might find a few worms. Even though they look very similar, no two worms are exactly the same! Challenge yourselves to find 5 ways they are similar and 5 ways they are different.
Quick Tip
Bugs and insects are really fun to observe, but you can compare and contrast anything in the garden! Brainstorm 5 similarities and 5 differences.
- Amount of sunlight one part of the garden receives compared to the other
- Flowers blooming on the same plant! They look similar but how are they different?
- Growth of two different plants. Maybe you planted them at the same time, but one might be doing better than the other. What if they are both thriving? I bet you can still find small differences between the two!
Simply talk about the similarities and differences out-loud. Then point to the different parts that you are mentioning.
Or record observations in a nature journal or butterfly observation journal. Both are super easy to keep and fun for kids of all ages!
You can learn how to start a nature journal with kids in this step by step guide.
Plant and Grow
From starting seeds indoors, direct sowing seeds outside, buying pant starts, and purchasing established plants there are sooo many different ways to start a garden.
You can even collect different plants from friends and neighbors!
Growing a few plants from seed with your kids is not only fun, but educational! there are a whole range of topics you can explore just by trying to grow plants from seed.
Don't worry even if some (or all) of the seedlings don't survive that's okay! If you're killing plants that means you are gardening! Ask me how I know 🙂
Easy plants to grow from seed
- Zinnias- an all time favorite annual flower!
- Sunflower- come in all different sizes and colors
- Peas- including sugar snap peas are delicious
- Lettuce- great to start when the weather is cool in the spring and fall
- Beans- including pole beans and bush beans
- Carrots- we have been growing carrots for the past few years from seed and they are a favorite!
Colorful Varieties
A fun way to get your child excited to grow different flowers and vegetables is to grow ones in different colors. For example, we planted the purple turnips below from seed! It was so much fun to see them growing in the garden.
- Rainbow carrots
- Purple turnips
- Yellow Tomatoes
- Purple Green Beans
- Red Sunflowers
As the plants grow you can talk about the different colors. You can even go on a color hunt right in your own garden! This color chart is an easy way for young kids to document the different colors they find.
Even in the off season you can grow plants indoors. Growing beans in plastic cups is a great way for kids to see the parts of a plant up close!
Growing Experiment
All you need are dry beans, paper towels, a clear plastic cup, water, and a sunny spot!
Many local garden centers and farm stands sell plant starts. If you are looking for different varieties they are a great place to look. Short on space? Don't worry you can grow almost anything inside a container as long as you have a few hours of direct sun.
Create
Below are a few easy activities you can make and display in your garden. These are inexpensive and are really easy to put together.
Rock Painting
Excited to make your own garden art? Painting rocks is a very easy activity that you can do with your kids. From butterflies, ladybugs, rainbows, and even heart rocks all you need are a few basic supplies.
Tip
Acrylic paint pens are fun and easy for kids to use when decorating rocks. Simply gather rocks from outside then decorate them using the pens!
Hand Made Bird Feeders
Making your own bird feeders is another fun activity for young kids. Pinecone bird feeders are super easy to make together. Recycled containers including milk jugs, 2 liter bottles, and cups also make great bases for bird feeders.
All you need are a few basic household supplies and a place to hang them up outside once they are done!
DIY Feeder
This bird feeder made from a paper cup is super easy! I love how kids can decorate it and add the pipe cleaners themselves.
Coloring Pages
Coloring is a fun and relaxing activity for kids of all ages. Scroll through my entire collection of coloring pages and print off a few different designs. Garden themed printables include: wiggly worms, life cycle of a butterfly, and caterpillar coloring pages.
I love taking them outside and coloring them out in nature. Watercolor paints, crayons, and markers can all be brought outside. Bring along a hard surface such as a wooden cutting board or clip board for your child to use as a work surface!
Additional Ideas
Other projects include creating your own plant supports using sticks, DIY garden markers, and even a small bird bath out of a shallow dish filled with water.
Ask your kids what they are interesting in making. Children often come up with the best ideas all on their own! Even if you don't have all the requirements supplies, brainstorm other materials that you can use instead.
Caring for the Garden
Learning about the needs of different plants and animals is a great topic to explore with your young child. In the garden you can observe a variety of flower and vegetables along with bugs and insects.
Caterpillars, butterflies, and bees are common backyard insects that visit a garden along with ants and ladybugs. Take time to observe them in real life.
- Which plants do they visit?
- What are they doing in the garden?
- Are they happy or looked stressed?
These are all great questions to explore together. Books are another great resource and are filled with information! Local libraries carry many of the books on these lists:
Hands-on projects include watering plants and pulling weeds. Kids love being involved in both of these tasks. Before letting them do them independently, spend some time talking about how much water each plant needs and which plants are weeds!
If you planted seeds, the seed packet is filled with information including time to harvest, temperature, size, etc. I love reading over seed packets with my child to learn more about each plant.
Parts of a Plant
Looking up close at the different parts of a plant is a wonderful activity for kids. You can use flowers growing in your own garden or ones purchased at the store. You can even observe the parts of a tree with your child.
The step by step guides below are filled with tips for how to make each activity a success. You can even download activity sheets to use within each post.
- Tulip Exploration - Learn the parts of a Flower
- Sunflower Parts
- Parts of a Tree
- Parts of an Apple- Hands on Activity
- Pumpkin Exploration - Learn the parts of a pumpkin
Looking for an activity for very young children? These sorting and classification activities focus on a plant's blooms!
Community
One of the best parts of gardening is connecting with others. Your child can pick a bouquet and deliver it to a neighbor. Swap seeds with a fellow gardener or even help a neighbor start their own garden. I have done all of those things and it always feels good to make connections with others and build community.
Visiting a local garden center or farm stand is a great place to learn about the plants that grow well in your area. You can have your child write down a few questions and bring them along with you on your next outing!
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