Kids Garden Reading Activities

Kids Garden Reading Activities

By Jacquie Fisher

One of our favorite things about Spring is starting our garden each year!  Gardening is a family affair at our home – the kids always choose a few plants to grow in addition to our stand-by favorites.  One thing I’ve learned over the last 12 years of gardening with the kids is that there are some wonderful ways to connect reading with all that digging in the dirt.

Choosing Your Plants

Believe it or not, our first trip is not to the garden store.  Instead we head to the library.  The kids really enjoy checking out books about plants and gardens.  Some of our favorite garden reads that can be found in the kid’s section of your local library include:

(We’ve linked each of these up to our Amazon Affiliate account just in case you decide you want to purchase one. We could receive a small portion of the sale in return to help support The Educators Spin On It.  All Opinions are written our own.)

• Grow Your Own Pizza: Gardening Plans and Recipes for Kids by Constance Hardesty
• Kids Garden!: The Anytime, Anyplace Guide to Sowing & Growing Fun (Williamson Kids Can! Series) & Growing Fun by Avery Hart
• Dinner from Dirt: Ten Meals Kids Can Grow & Cook & Cook by Emily Scott

After a few garden-themed story sessions, we usually have a nice list of the plants we’d like to get when we hit the garden store.

Did you catch that word ‘list’?

This is where I conveniently get the kids to practicing their writing skills.  They write the names of the plants we found in our books on their own list.  It’s a great reading tool once we get to the garden store.

Reading at the Garden Store

When they were younger, they used the list to match their plant names to the seed packets.  Begin with having them search for the first letter of their plant on each of the seed packets.  The nice thing about seed packets is they usually include a picture of the plant.  Pictures are really nice reading helpers and can boost a child’s confidence in finding the correct seeds.

As the kids advanced in their reading, I would ask them to give me the list while they were looking for seed packets to see if they were able to sound out some of the various plant names.

Creating Garden Markers

With our seeds in hand, we head home to decide what we will use for garden markers this year.  It’s always different for each garden – sometimes we decorate popsicle sticks with glitter markers.  On other years, we’ve used the seed packets to make markers.

This year, we decided to go colorful and make mini-pot markers for our plants!  We found some small clay pots and used acrylic paint to decorate the pots.  To use pots as garden markers, they will sit upside-down in the garden.  Once the pots were dry, we used our seed packets to copy the name of our plants on the rim of each of the pots.

Reading in the Garden

You can carry reading into the garden as well.  If you read the back of the seed packets, they will explain how far apart to plant each seed, how frequently to water the plant, how much sun the plant will need and more details about carrying for your plants.

And be sure to show the kids the information on ‘maturity’ – each packet will give you an approximate number of growing days for the plant.  Let the kids compare how long it takes to grow the plants you chose and then have them count the days on the calendar so they can keep track of the plant’s growth.

It’s also fun to read to your plants!  Did you know that plants will grow faster if you talk to them?!  Research studies have shown that plants respond to sound and human voices.  So grab a favorite garden book and invite your plants to story time!  Try a few of these garden-themed books:

(We’ve linked each of these up to our Amazon Affiliate account just in case you decide you want to purchase one. We could receive a small portion of the sale in return to help support The Educators Spin On It.  All Opinions are written our own.)

• The Gardener by Sarah Stewart
• The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
• The Carrot Seed 60th Anniversary Edition by Ruth Krauss
• Little Critter: A Green, Green Garden (My First I Can Read) by Mercer Mayer

How do you bring reading into your garden?

Jacquie Fisher is the founder of Edventures with Kids , a blog that shares unique ideas for keeping kids creative & curious. She believes that kids are more likely to enjoy learning when they are offered hands-on activities and the opportunity to explore new places. ‘Edventures’ encourage families to try new activities, get outdoors, travel together and connect kids with great books. You can also find her on Facebook , Google+, Twitter and Pinterest.

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