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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Easy Sensory Activities for Valentine's Day

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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