Gardens I hope every teacher can instill the excitement of planting and watching the seed’s roots grow and emerge into a beautiful flower or a yummy vegetable. It is so much fun when we can bring our flowers or vegetables into the house and enjoy them.
Art Activities
Books
Songs/Fingerplays
Center/Misc Ideas
Handprint Flowers
Paint children's hands in different colors to make a rainbow garden. They can paint with side of their hand for stems and leaves.
Painting Flowers with bottles
Use the bottom of pop or water bottles to paint flower petals.
Planting A Rainbow
SPRING FLOWERS
Tune: A Hunting We Will Go
A purple lilac here,
A yellow tulip there.
A crocus and a daffodil,
Spring flowers everywhere.
Garden Discovery Table
Let the children pour and dig in the dirt in the discovery table. You can add a few bunches of artificial flowers to add to the garden.
Muffin Paper Flowers
Water Paint, Roller paint, chalk or marker the inside of muffin papers or the smaller candy size to glue in the middle of precut flower petal shapes. Add stems and leaves to make your own flower garden.
The muffin flowers can also be glued to green popsicle stick with leaves added and planted in a potting soil garden.
Flower Garden
PLANTING FLOWERS
Tune: Are You Sleeping
Planting flowers, planting flowers,
In the ground, in the ground,
Water them and watch them grow,
Water them and watch them grow,
All around, all around.
Plant Seeds or Small Flowers
We plant our seeds in small ziplocs and hang them in the window with a paper clip. This allows us to zip them over the weekend so they don't dry out and allows the kids to see the roots growing. You can also plant them in clear cup and rubber band a ziploc to the top of the cup. We also use a film canister for the amount of water the child can put in their plant which eliminates big spills on the floor too.
Vegetable Prints
Paint with vegetables cut in half. You can use celery cut close to the base so all the stalks look like petals, or treviso radicchio, peppers, onions, and potatoes that can have cookie cutter shapes in the middle or lines to make it look like leaf veins.
Add A Basket Or Jar
You could add a basket at the bottom to put all the vegetable prints in or you can draw a big mason jar around them and glue some white thin fabric at the top to cover the lid of the jar.
Growing Vegetable Soup
PLANT THE GARDEN
Tune: Are You Sleeping
Plant the garden, plant the garden.
Watch it grow, watch it grow.
Count the pretty flowers,
Count the pretty flowers,
All in a row, all in a row.
2nd verse is the same using: Count the yummy veggies
Garden Snack
Have salad for snack that has different veggies from a garden, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots and celery.
Memory Cards
Match laminated pictures of different flowers, vegetables and insects you would find in a garden.
Seed Collage or Seed Sunflower
Glue a variety of seeds in a collage on paper or on paper cut out in the shape of a sunflower. Add a long stem and leaves.
The Surprise Garden
THE GARDENING SONG
Tune: A, B, C, Song jazzed up
First you take a shovel, a rake, and a hoe,
Plant a little garden, place seeds in a row.
Water them and weed them through the summer heat,
And then you'll have some flowers or vegetables to eat.
Plant a little garden, with seeds in a row.
Sun and water make them grow, grow, grow.
Dyeing Flowers
Freshly cut the stems of white flowers (carnation or daisy) with a sharp knife at an angle and place one in clear water and others in different colors of water dyed with food coloring. Discuss how the dyed water is absorbed into the flower.
Worm Spaghetti Art
I cooked spaghetti in brown tinted water and let the children mix it in with the chocolate pudding and crushed oreo "dirt" dropped on paper to look like worms. It was as messy as I anticipated but definately yummy and fun.
Kids In The Garden
EARTHWORM
Tune: Did You Ever See A Lassie
Did you ever see an earthworm
An earthworm, an earthworm
Did you ever see an earthworm
Move this way and that?
Move this way and that way
And this way and that?
Did you ever see an earthworm
Move this way and that?
Gummy Worm Snack
Use crushed Oreos in chocolate pudding with gummy worms for snack
Observing Live Worm Tunnels
Bring in live night crawlers in dirt in a clear container to observe the tunnels they create to churn up the earth.