Gardening With Your Preschooler
It’s warming up, the perfect time to plant seeds with your child. With the frost behind us, the warm soil in May will help seeds to grow.
There are many benefits to gardening with your preschooler, including engaging their senses and fine motor skills, teaching science and math, and encouraging good habits like healthy eating, patience, and responsibility.
Plus – lot’s of family bonding and fun.
When buying seeds, the best veggies to try this time of year are kale, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. If you want to plant flowers, try dahlias, purple fountain grass, blackeyed susans, penstemons, and coreopsis.
Here are the supplies and steps you need to grow plants from seeds with your preschooler.
Gardening With Your Preschooler
Supplies Needed
- Biodegradable seed pots
- Soil
- Seeds
- Shovel or scoop
- Spray bottle or eye dropper
- Craft sticks
Step 1. Place soil into a bin, and let your child scoop the soil into the pots until it’s almost to the top.
Step 2: Place a few seeds in your child’s hand to place in each pot. Show them how to pinch and push the seeds into the soil. You may want to make quite a few, you never know how many will actually sprout.
Step 3: Write the name of each plant on a craft stick, and let your child put them in the pots.
Step 4: Explain how the seeds need water and sun to grow. Let them use the eye dropper or spray bottle to moisten the soil, just like the rain. Put them on a windowsill with plenty of sunshine, and keep watch over the next few weeks. Your plants need a little spritz or a few drops of water once a day.
Step 5: When the seeds sprout into little plants, spend a few days transitioning them from the indoors to the outdoors. You and your child should bring them outside for a couple of hours a day for 7 to 10 days to get used to the wind and sun.
Step 6: Time to plant outside! When you first plant your little seedlings in outdoor soil, give them lots of water. Try to do this on an overcast day to give your plants time to settle into the soil.
We hope your seed grow into lots of yummy veggies and beautiful flowers that you can enjoy all summer long. Be sure to share pictures on our Facebook pages!
Sources: almanac.com, mommyuniversitynj.com, nearsay.com, teaching2and3yearolds.com, and ufseeds.com
