3 ways of teaching kids about the garden

(This is a collaborative post) There are many great achievements and benefits you might expect to come out of teaching kids about the garden. The garden is an important part of the home, and the more involved you can get kids in it, the more that you will find it is being looked after properly. But It’s also an important thing for the children themselves to appreciate, and you might discover that there are great benefits to teaching kids about the garden, and getting them more involved for these reasons. If you are thinking about doing this, but you don’t know where to start, take a look at the following.

In this article, we are going to put together a few of the simple things you can get your children to help you with in the garden – for the sake of the garden itself, but also themselves.

Sowing seeds

One of the great joys that you can instil in your children is learning to grow plants from seed; a great place to start teaching kids about the garden.

When you teach your children the joy of sowing seeds, you will find that it amazes them, and probably this will mean that they will want to do it again in future. That is certainly a useful skill to have, and it is something that you can easily teach them in an afternoon. It’s good to start with something that grows clearly visibly and fast, such as cress. You might even encourage the seeds along with some moist paper towels or by covering them up with clingfilm. All of this can be a great opportunity for education for your children, and you should make the most of that opportunity as you see fit. Sowing seeds can be fun and educational in this way, and you should find it interests your children.

Keeping animals

If you have the space, and you are keen to keep some animals, then this is something else you might want to encourage your kids to help out with. Keeping animals does wonders for children: it enables them to gain a confidence around animals which can help later in life should they come into contact with them in the wild

It also means that they are going to be able to appreciate and understand issues of animal welfare too. There are some animals that you should be able to keep in your garden pretty easily, such as chickens and ducks.

The benefit of keeping chickens and ducks, of course, is that you get a daily supply of eggs. You can collect these eggs with your children – which they will find to be magical – or ask them to help you feed them with Little Peckers Bird Food. Either way, it’s a great experience for them.

Weeding

A simple task that always needs doing, you will surely find that you always want a little more help when it comes to weeding your garden. It is also a great thing to get your children used to doing, as it helps them to distinguish between plants – a useful ability which improves their general understanding of nature. Show them how to pull weeds from the roots and make sure that they don’t return.

We hope these are helpful ideas for teaching kids about the garden; do have a look at some of the other garden related resources on the site:

• Make a flower pot fairy garden,
• Take a look at our bug hunt printable to get the kids spotting the wildlife,
• Colour in these fabulous adult and kids butterfly colouring pages, and
• Finally five tips to help create some imaginative play spaces in the garden for you as well.

If you are looking for other activities off site – have a bash at these too:

• Play dough activities in the garden from Mama Papa and Bubba,
• 17 activities for the kids in the garden from Teaching Mama,
• Fun-a-Day has some more fairy garden ideas, and
• Last but not least, Fantastic Fun and Learning has some science ideas for you for the garden.

Cheers for coming to see us, and we hope you will come back soon – after you have been outside and finished teaching kids about the garden of course!

Helen

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