Gardening Activities For Preschoolers To Get Them Interested In Nature

Why is gardening important for preschoolers?

• Involving your preschooler in gardening activities is the best way for her to explore her surroundings first-hand and experience the natural world.
• Preschool planting activities also provide your child with a great opportunity to spend time outdoors and learn about flowers, fruits, vegetables, and nutritious foods.
• Gardening activities for kids play an important role in enhancing their sensorimotor skills. While out in the garden, your child will inhale the scent of different flowers, and touch and feel the texture of various plants and leaves. Also, they will learn how to hold and use small tools to plant saplings. Moving about in the uneven garden terrain will also improve their ability to balance better.
• Your child will develop a sense of responsibility when tending to the plants. Your child will understand that they will have to wait patiently for the plant to grow and learn to regulate emotions such as disappointment or sadness when any of their saplings fail to thrive.
• In addition to benefitting their health and overall development, teaching preschoolers about plants helps to introduce them to the basic concepts of science and environment, which they will study in their school, in the next few years.

Best gardening activities for preschoolers

If you want to make gardening fun for your child, here's a list of five easy-to-do and interesting planting activities for kids that integrate basic gardening skills with some fun-filled artwork. Try these preschool planting activities with your child and let them have some hands-on experience in growing plants and vegetables and caring for them.

1. A kitchen garden

How to do: Select herbs like coriander and fenugreek or pulses like moong beans and Bengal gram, which are of high nutritional value. Make sure that the herbs you select do not take too long to grow as children may grow tired of waiting for them to grow and can lose interest in the activity. Common kitchen herbs such as coriander and fenugreek take about two or three days to a week to sprout. Old plastic boxes can serve as containers and you can make your child plant the seeds. Let them monitor the growth of the plants every day.

When the herbs grow, you can use them to make your child's favourite dishes and involve her in the process of cooking too.

How it helps: With such garden projects for kids, you can help your child make their own easy DIY kitchen herb garden and learn the importance of eating nutritious food.

2. A colourful flower garden

Who doesn't love flowers? Children, especially, are sure to have a great time growing flowers and watching them bloom into colourful bunches.

How to do: For this gardening project for preschoolers, choose flowers of different hues that will not take too long to grow. You can bring saplings of bougainvillaea of different colours and sit with your child to plant them in medium-sized pots. To make the whole project more artistic, pick up your acrylic colour set and involve your child in first painting the pots with any colour of their choice and then filling them up with polka dots of contrasting colors. Your child's kindergarten garden project can't get more colourful than this.

How it helps: Make your child water the plants every day and watch the joy on their face as the flowers bloom.

3. A fruits and veggies garden

How to do: Choose fruits and vegetables that are easy to grow in limited spaces. Tomatoes, brinjals, carrots and melons are a few popular choices for a home-grown garden. In the days you track the growth of the plants, you can teach your child about the process of growth of a plant in stages. You can also touch upon concepts like photosynthesis and germination, though your child may be too young to understand the details.

You can also create large-size cut-outs of the vegetables and fruits in colour paper and foam paper and use them as labels for the pots. This is a good garden craft idea for preschoolers. Your child will have fun while working with the colour paper to create labels and stick them on the pots.

How it helps: Growing a 'fruit and vegetable' garden can be a good way to encourage healthy eating habits in your child.

4. A hanging garden for home decor

How to do: Visit the nearby nursery with your child to get a few indoor plants. This is also a great opportunity for you to show her the different plants that are nurtured in a nursery and both of you can have a gala time choosing your plants. Talk to the nursery expert to learn about different ways to care for indoor plants. You can buy as many as you require to fill every room of your house.

At home, make use of wooden, cardboard or plastic boxes to make the containers for the plants. Your child can fill the planter with the potting mixture and place the plants in them. Attach thick ropes to the containers to create the hangers. Make several such hanging containers with different varieties of indoor plants and hang them in different parts of your house.

How it helps: With this plant project for preschoolers, you can involve your child in making beautiful and natural decorations for the home.

5. A rooftop garden

Rooftop gardening is a popular trend these days among families. This can be an elaborate project if you live in an independent house.

How to do: You can cover up the entire terrace space with kid-friendly plants of different varieties, which can include fruits, vegetables, flowers, herbs and creepers. You and your child can spend days together tending to these plants and monitoring their growth. However, if you live in a shared apartment, you may have to consult your neighbours about using the common space.

How it helps: While you may or may not have the luxury of large spaces for gardening if you live in an urban apartment, these simple activities can ensure that your child is not deprived of the pure joy that gardening brings. Before you set out though, don't forget to buy a set of child-friendly gardening tools.

We hope you found our list of gardening ideas for kids interesting and practical enough to inspire you. This will be a great learning experience for your child as he observes the growing process of plants from seedlings to fully mature plants.