Child-friendly gardening activities to engage and educate
School-aged children can now transform their backyards into a fun and educational playground with a variety of creative outdoor activities. These activities not only make garden time enjoyable but also support physical development, emotional growth, ecological literacy, and STEM learning.
One of the popular gardening projects is the hanging tin-can planters made from recycled tin cans, painted in different colours, and hung on nails with part-filled compost and plants. For a mini-world terrarium, succulents, gravel, compost, and plants can be placed in a jar and stood on a bright indoor windowsill. Kids can also create a funny face with cat grass in a 2L soft drinks bottle or a dinosaur herb garden by stenciling a child's name on a crate, growing scented herbs and edible plants, and using dinosaur figures as plant labels.
Involving children in composting helps them understand decomposition and recycling, fostering ecological awareness and care for the environment. A grass bucket seat can be made by filling an old metal bucket with compost, sowing lawn seed, and letting it grow until it's thick enough to be cut.
Encouraging kids to photograph plants, insects, and garden wildlife enhances observation skills and creativity. Building a digging patch provides a designated digging area with tools, encouraging exploration, sensory play, and imagination. Den making, collecting sticks or branches to build shelters or dens, promotes problem solving, teamwork, and physical activity.
Engaging in water tables or making mud pies offers tactile sensory experiences and open-ended play. For older children, combining gardening with tech projects such as monitoring pollinators with cameras and AI, creating plant identification apps, or tracking butterfly migrations can deepen learning and digital skills in a hands-on outdoor environment.
The suggested garden projects are designed to get children outside and away from screens. The magic of seeing a seed transform into a plant can be experienced by growing radishes in a container filled with peat-free, multi-purpose compost. Growing micro-greens from various vegetables can be done in any container, and the plants can be harvested by snipping them off at the base.
Children can collect seeds from plants and crops that are in bloom for sowing next year. Potting up colourful containers is an easy project that involves choosing plants and a matching pot, adding compost, and arranging the plants. Container-grown plants, like radishes, dry out quickly, especially in summer, so they require frequent watering.
A twig teepee can be built using branches stacked against a wall, fence, or tree, providing an adult-free space for children. A bug box project can be made using an open-fronted box, with materials collected from the garden such as a drilled log, pine cones, stones, twigs, dried grass, and broken pots to attract bugs.
These activities not only make garden time fun but also support physical development, emotional growth, ecological literacy, and STEM learning. So, let's get the children outside and create a magical garden adventure!
References: [1] Routledge, T. (2017). Outdoor Classroom: A Guide for Teachers. Routledge. [2] National Wildlife Federation. (n.d.). Garden for Wildlife. National Wildlife Federation. [3] STEM Learning Ltd. (2018). Practical Action. STEM Learning Ltd. [4] Wood, J. (2015). Outdoor Play and Learning. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Creating a home-and-garden lifestyle, kids can construct a twig teepee from branches and grow micro-greens in containers as entertaining DIY projects. Similarly, they can engage in a gardening activity by building a hanging tin-can planter, which supports physical development while fostering ecological awareness through understanding decompositions and recycling.
