Children are naturally delighted by the things surrounding them – every flower, bug or fruit can make them smile. This love of nature and its creatures need to be nurtured by letting kids spending as much time as possible outside, playing and exploring the world. This is how a deep connection between them will be created, making a child grow healthy and care about the planet.
Your garden is the closes connection to nature your children have. Many activities there can help them experience the world, like using nature to create art or helping you with gardening. Here are just a couple of examples of how you can include your child in your activities, enabling them to both have fun and educational time:
Mix responsibility with fun
The best way to introduce children to some responsibilities is to make them fun. For example, you can start by giving your kid the responsibility for one special plant, meaning they need to water them. Next, you can choose a small area where your kid can learn how to weed and help the rest of the plants grow.
Dinner can be made special, as you can send your child to pick herbs to make it while picking ripe vegetables or fruit will be less often but interesting nonetheless. If you give your child a title, such as “Assistant Pollinator”, they will be proud of themselves and enjoy the responsibilities you give them.
Turn your child into an explorer
Education can be magical, especially for kids, who find most things astounding and exciting. Your garden can be a source of incredible knowledge for your child if you play your cards right. You could make a Kid’s Garden inside the actual garden, where your kid can do experiments on their own, without you worrying that it will mess up the rest of greenery. While preparing to plant new seeds, let your child help you with sorting them out.
You can also point them out the differences between various types of plants – you’ll be surprised how quick children remember this stuff. Using a magnifying glass in the garden to observe all the magical things happening in the garden can be very interesting and exciting, especially observing buds, offsprings and little insects and bugs doing their jobs.
Next, as all creative landscape designers do, you and your kid should make a garden plan together. Let your child give ideas and suggestions, who knows, maybe you’ll hear something really useful. Next thing is to actually plant all those seeds and plants together, and teach your kid to measure the growth of the plants from time to time – they will feel responsible for them and be glad each time they notice progress.
Creative things to make
There are things from your house that could be used to make something creative with your child. For example, old rain-boots, wheelbarrow or teapot can be used as flower pots. Just fill them with potting soil and let your kid choose where to put it.
Or you could collect leaves, petals, and twigs while walking together and then glue them or string together on a piece of paper and make a collage. Also, you can pinecones, acorns, and twigs, using pinecones and acorns as heads, while taping twigs to them to make legs – when these “seed bugs” are finished, let your child name them and make up a story about them.
All in all
Children’s capacity to learn and their desire to explore and be amazed are your constant motivation to expose them to new things. Garden activities will not only be both educational and fun for your child but it will also be a bond that connects you two and builds an even stronger relationship. So, what are you waiting for? Take your kid and go outside and have fun!
