Kids in the Garden: The Indoor Garden

Are you not quite ready for outdoor gardening to start? Still cold and snowing outside?   Start indoors with Bulbs.  Here's a great way to teach your children about gardening Indoors. 

We had fun watching and journaling about our Paperwhite that has grown over the past month.  Each day when my daughter would wake up she'd go over and look at her plant that was growing and talk about the changes.  Teaching your child the skill of observation and patience is a skill they need in life. 

Make a Plant Journal

We recorded our observations in a Plant Journal.  As she was observing the changes she would draw a picture in the plant journal.  To encourage writing she would also write about the changes she was observing.  I encouraged her to look for differences and similarities from the last time she look at the plant.  She's also working on memory skills too.  Here's an example of some of the things that what she wrote

I put the bulbs in the dirt today. 

My plant is growing green leaves.

My plant grew 2 inches. 

My plant has a round bump at the top of the leaf. 

The bump is getting bigger. 

It's here!  I see a white flower! 

Now there are three white flowers!

We added this cute little heart to the pot as the plant start growing.  It was a great way to see the physical growth of the Living plant in comparison to a Non Living Object.  One of the benchmarks your child will work on learning in school is Living vs Non Living, here's a quick way to give them a living example of it. 

We were incorporating our math skills too. We would use a ruler to measure how tall the bulbs had grown.   I'd have her make a number sentence using the numbers that she  had documented.  We measured it once a week so we would have bigger numbers to work with.  Here's an example of the number sentences we used. 2+1=3, 3+2=5, 5+3=8, 8+4=12.It was a lot of fun to see the numbers changing and seeing her try to figure out how to create a number sentence with that.  

Hope you have fun creating your own Plant Journal with your child.  Plant Journals will be fun to do  with the plants in your Garden too!   Amanda's going to post about how her seeds are doing indoors and transplating them with your children next.  Can't wait to read about. 

Need more ideas for having your Kids in the Garden?  Check them out! 
Starting Seeds Indoors
How to Grow Potatoes
Make Plant Labels to Teach Reading
Growing Peas  
Seeds vs. Transplants
Learning to Love Vegetables
Living vs Non-Living Printable  

Spring is coming.  We're going on a Hunt for Spring today, I can't wait to share our discoveries with you this week.     

 
Linking up to: All Year Round Blog Carnival: Spring