4 Fun and Easy Children's Gardening Activities
To celebrate National Children’s Gardening Week, we’ve put together 4 easy garden-based activities for your little ones to get stuck into!
We may be slightly biased in saying that gardening is a great and fun activity, but it has been researched that being out in the garden can make a positive impact on our health and well-being. For our little oaks these benefits can include:
- Building self-esteem
- Making them feel happy
- Good for socialising with family / develops social skills
- Boosts Vitamin D
- Growing their own food, encouraging healthy eating
It’s also a great learning curve and point of discussion. Sensory development is a further benefit of being outdoors. Gardening will engage all sorts of senses and helps children recognise them without even realising! Who knew learning could be so fun?
Here are our ideas to try out this National Children’s Gardening Week:
- Make a Miniature Garden
This is such a fun activity to get stuck into and will allow so much room for creativity. All you need to do is have a hunt around the garden (or a local park area) and find some interesting bits and bobs to put into your mini garden. Psst, that unwanted moss in the garden could be great as grass in the mini gardens.
Once you’ve got a little haul from the garden, find some unused plant pots, or maybe a sturdy cardboard box that’s going out for recycling, and fill them with soil. From here, the kids can go off into their own creative world and come up with a miniature garden that reflects their own interests!
This is a great exercise, perfect for all ages, as it can be as simple or as complicated as they like! It could also encourage further crafts if they want to really take their gardens to the next level with themes such as fairies, football, dinosaurs or a safari.
A simple, laid-back nature craft, no rules or fiddly crafting involved; just lots of imagination.
- 5 Senses Scavenger Hunt
A scavenger hunt is another great activity for children of all ages and could even be a good activity to do before creating your miniature garden!
For this activity, all you’ll need to do is set up a checklist beforehand including anything you like for the children to have to find. Here we have an example of a checklist that you can download and print out:
The checklist can be as long or as short as you like and you could challenge them by asking for 2 or 3 objects for each bullet point. This activity, as the name suggests, gets all 5 senses involved and is fun for the kids to go off and explore to see what they can find.
Since this activity involves finding objects, it might be a nice idea to do this activity and then go straight into activity number 1 and see what sort of garden they can create with the objects they find.
- Make Bird Feeders
We held an Eco-Friendly Bird Feeder activity stand earlier in the year and they were so easy to make! All you need is some cardboard tubes, natural or organic peanut butter, seeds and some string!
First, you’ll have to spread a thick, generous layer of peanut butter over a cardboard tube. Once it’s layered on, roll it in bird seed* so that the peanut butter is fully covered.
Finally, just thread a piece of string through the tube and tie it so that you can hang your homemade bird feeder in the garden.
It’s as easy as that!
*Other household alternatives to bird seed that you could use instead include peanut pieces, sunflower hearts, dried fruits softened with water, crumbled or grated cheese, cooked rice and breadcrumbs.
- Create a Bug Box
This fun bug box project is another easy one, which could also be tied into the scavenger hunt activity. All you need is an open-fronted box. Let the kids run wild in the garden to find materials to fill it. A drilled log can become a cozy home for solitary bees, and adding pinecones, stones, broken pots, twigs, and dried grass will attract ladybirds, woodlice, and if you’re lucky, maybe even a mouse or toad!
This is a project that you can make as simple or as complicated as you wish.
So there we have our 4 fun and easy activities to get stuck into this National Children’s Gardening Week. Let us know if you give them a go and share any pictures with us via our social media!
@oldrailwaylinegardencentre