Gardening Activities for Kids

I have started volunteering at our local botanical garden, and it’s so fun to do activities with the kids and show them all the different things that grow there. Whether you’re gardening at home or at school, getting kids involved in planting and caring for flowers, plants and vegetables is a lot of fun for all involved.

If you don’t have easy access to land to garden, there are still plenty of garden activities you can try. Such as planting in eggshells, like in this project from Little Bins for Little Hands. This post goes into a lot of detail about seed germination and the different stages, and includes printable worksheets on the life cycle of a bean plant.

The plant science experiments from Lessons 4 Little Ones don’t require planting in the ground; cups are just fine. A couple of the experiments include testing which kind of water helps plants grow better, investigating whether plants need light and growing grass in cups with each child’s picture on them (so cute!). If your classroom has windows, you can also do the classic experiment of sprouting beans in plastic bag “greenhouses.”

Or make a greenhouse in a plastic cup with this idea from Mama Papa Bubba. You can also try regrowing lettuce from the core, as shown in this tutorial from The Educators’ Spin On It.

Start with plants instead of seeds and you can make a jar terrarium with this idea from Barley & Birch.

If you do have some outdoors space, check out these posts on the fastest sprouting seeds (You Should Grow), easy plants to grow from seed (Crafts on Sea) and the easiest vegetables to grow (Together Time Family).

If you’re doing anything gardening or plant related with kids of almost any age, you’ll want to check out the printable botany lessons from 123 Homeschool 4 Me. This collection includes of 80 pages of resources, from life cycle information to plant cards, fact sheets, experiments and more. This is not a free resource but it’s jam packed with goodness.

Having a garden journal is a fun way for kids to record what they plant in the garden and how it grows. This kids garden planner from Farm House By L on Etsy includes a garden checklist, diary and journal pages and a scavenger hunt for kids to do in the garden.

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Book Review: Off to the Nursery

When my daughter was young she loved the PBS show “Peg + Cat,” and if you’ve got a fan of that show in your house this activity will be even better, but it doesn’t matter if your kids don’t already know these characters to learn about fractions with pizza.

There’s an episode of “Peg + Cat” where they are working in a pizza place and have to divide pies to put different kinds of toppings of different parts of the pie (there’s also an online game with the same concept, which I can’t believe still exists because my kiddo played it years ago).

Inspired by the episode and a companion book, Nature Homeschool developed an activity for learning about fractions and entrepreneurship using pizza. They developed a pizza shop and used the printables and teaching guide from Teacher Vision to learn more about fractions using pizza as the foundation. Their post also has a pizza order form printable you can use when you role play a pizza shop.

The Inspiration Edit also has some cute printable worksheets using a pizza to learn about fractions. And Life Over Cs has some fun printable pizza fraction activities, such as the printable fraction memory game shown here.

If you want to increase the pretend play factor with this one, you can make a pizza and toppings out of paper, cardboard or felt. Or use a paper plate as your crust and simple shapes cut out of paper to be toppings. The pretend play pizza making kit from Glued to My Crafts uses an individual slice, but you could do the same thing with a whole pie’s worth of slices.

Kids Craft Room has another fun pizza play food idea, this time using salt dough for the crust. The toppings are made out of felt so you can practice putting different toppings on a fraction of the pizza and learn as you play.

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