Are you teaching a garden theme in your preschool classroom or homeschool? Keep reading for the best Gardens that Grow preschool activities and watch your child’s knowledge bloom!
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GARDENS THAT GROW PRESCHOOL ACTIVITIES
One of the most cultivating themes to teach (whether you’re homeschooling or teaching in a preschool or kindergarten classroom) is Gardens That Grow. Little ones’ knowledge will flourish when learning about and participating in activities about growing plants, flowers, and gardens.
Your little ones will be utilizing familiar skills as well as acquiring new ones to continue in their quest for becoming better readers, writers, and learners! Not to mention all of this exploration leads to interactive STEM play. So let’s get ready to GROW new readers!
Keep reading for over 20 gardening activities for your preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students. These ideas include literacy, math, fine and gross motor skills, and more. Grab your printables for math & literacy here. Oh, and there are two freebies, too!
If you want a copy of my early themes (including an editable version where you can type in your own themes), check out this freebie. (*Please note: You will need to download this file to your computer and then open it with Adobe in order to add your own themes. You cannot add your themes from your web browser.)
GARDENS THAT GROW ACTIVITIES: LITERACY
Before you get started with your garden theme, make sure you have your books all ready to go! For this unit, we’re going to use our spring book list, which has over 20 books for you to choose from! This list includes LOTS of books about flowers, gardens, and growing plants. Make sure to request these from your local library (or order them from Amazon) a few weeks before you start your theme.
You’re definitely going to want to start your garden theme with these vocabulary cards! Do your littles know how to dig a hole with a shovel? Have they ever planted seeds and watered them until they grew? These cards are the perfect way to introduce your little learners to the 15 garden-related words they’ll be learning about over the course of the unit. You can use these vocabulary cards in your writing center, as a Write the Room activity, or as a picture match.
For Write the Room or Color the Room activities, you can hide the garden vocabulary word cards around the room or in a sensory bin (we used green shredded paper and pretended it was grass.) Have your little one match the card to the picture on the activity page. They can choose to write the word on the correct line, color the matching picture, or simply circle the picture that is a match.
Bees love flowers, especially ones that have the same letter on them! Little ones will be matching the letters on the bees with the letters on the flowers. This activity can be found in my Spring Activities post.
This activity has your little one clapping the number of syllables in the garden vocabulary words, which is a great way to develop syllable awareness. After they make play dough balls for each syllable, they will smash the balls as they say the word again. Finally, they will write how many syllables there were in the word.
There’s a video on You Tube about the life cycle of a sunflower that goes along perfectly with this activity! Little ones will cut out the steps of a sunflower’s life cycle and put them in order. As an optional activity, you and your little ones can plant sunflower seeds and watch them grow!
This is another activity that has cards showing the different stages of a growing sunflower that they will put in sequential order. Using play dough, they will create pictures of the different stages.
Little ones LOVE to play board games, and this one will be a new family favorite! After cutting out the picture cards and putting them in piles, little ones will spin the spinner to see which vegetable garden card they can add to their boards. If the spinner lands on a card they already have, it is the next player’s turn. Whoever completes their Vegetable Garden mat first wins the game!
Are your little ones familiar how to play Tic-Tac-Toe? This game is played using different colored flower cards instead of Xs and Os. This is a good game to teach your little ones about strategy, taking turns, and being a good sport!
Onset-Rime is an important milestone on the road to phonological awareness. Little ones will be choosing an ONSET (the first consonant of a word) and the RIME (the vowel and everything that comes after) and attempting to blend them together to read the word they created. If they’re ready, they can also write the word they made in a notebook or on a whiteboard.
Practicing letter sounds is always a great activity for little ones. This activity has them saying what the picture cards are showing and determining the first letter sound. The more they practice, the more proficient they will become at hearing those beginning sounds!
This is a FREE activity that can be downloaded from my Spring Sensory Bin post. It has little ones matching the flower stem word family (such as -ag) with the correct flower petal pictures (such as “bag”). Can they find another flower petal picture that has the same word family ending? If so, they have made rhyming words! How many more words that rhyme can they come up with?
*Important Warning: If you choose to put these cards in potting soil, please know that potting soil can contain microorganisms, pesticides, and other potential hazards, so it’s important to take precautions when handling it:
- Never let your child put potting soil in their mouth.
- Make sure they don’t have any cuts on their hands that could get infected when playing with the soil.
- Have them wash their hands immediately after using this sensory bin.
GARDENS THAT GROW ACTIVITIES: MATH
For this activity, little ones will choose a numbered flower card and place it on the mat. Then they will choose a flower petal card and also place it on the mat. They will count out small manipulatives for each and determine if the two are equal or not.
After choosing a pattern card, your little ones will try to recreate the pattern using the garden cards or any other small manipulatives (as long as they are different colors). This is a skill that will help them to recognize patterns everywhere! Have them make patterns that you or other littles can try to recreate. They can also do the garden actions (like digging, planting, and watering) to create patterns, too!
Little ones will be learning about bar graphs in this interactive activity. After explaining how a bar graph works, they will look at the four flower choices and color (or place a small manipulative) in the box above their favorite. Have them ask others (family members, teachers, friends, etc) which is their favorite and fill in the graph. Which flower is the winner?!
Little ones LOVE to play store, so this activity will surely please them! Tell them they will be helping out in a farmer’s market today. Their job will be to choose an order card and count out the different vegetable cards to complete the order. Then they will pack the cards into the empty baskets for the customers to take home.
This activity has your little ones making simple addition problems, either up to 5 or 10. They will choose a flower card and determine how many more flowers they will need to add up to 5 or 10. If they are able, they can place numbers on the lines (or write them) to show the addition problem that they made.
After reviewing the different shapes in this activity, little ones will sort the flowers by whether the shapes have straight lines or curved lines in them and place them in the correct flower pot. Then they will put tally marks for each on the mat. How many of each are there? Are there more shapes with straight lines or curved lines? These shape cards can also be used to play Memory or Go Fish!
These Garden measurement rulers can be used to measure various objects around the room. The activity includes different vegetable rulers that have different sized units of measurement. Can they tell you why the measurements are different for the different vegetable sizes? You can also introduce a ruler or tape measure (standard unit of measurement) and compare it to the vegetable ruler (nonstandard unit of measurement).
You need play dough and a dice for this activity. Little ones will roll the dice and quickly tell you the number they rolled by subitizing (the ability to recognize the number of objects without counting each one). They will match their dice number to the picture mat and “plant” (recreate) the matching flower using as many colored play dough petals as the number they rolled. This is a great activity to strengthen math skills AND fine motor skills.
This is another FREE activity that includes different pattern flower cards that your little ones can use as examples to make their own patterns using small colored manipulatives.
This activity (along with all of our freebies!) can be downloaded from the Free Activity Library. If you’re already a member of our email community, you can click HERE to head to the Free Activity Library, enter your password (it’s on your most current email from me), and download your copy!
If you’d like to join our email community & receive the password as my way of saying THANK YOU for joining, you can click HERE to subscribe. Once you enter your information, the password will be emailed to you within minutes.
GARDENS THAT GROW: HANDS-ON ACTIVITIES, CRAFTS, AND SNACKS
This is a fun art activity that your little one will love! Using a paper towel roll, a paper plate, some yellow and green paint, and some sunflower seeds, little ones will create a beautiful sunflower. If you have a sensory bin filled with sand or black beans, they can “plant” their sunflowers!
This is a great activity to do at snack time. Using sections of oranges or pieces of strawberries for petals, kiwi pieces for leaves, and pretzel sticks for stems, little ones can create beautiful flowers that are delicious as well as healthy! Check out this post for more spring-inspired snacks!
Print these bookmarks on cardstock and cut them out for your little ones to decorate. If possible, laminate them after they’re decorated so little ones can use them when reading their favorite books!
For this yummy treat you will need mini pretzels, some almond bark or white candy melts, and mini M&Ms. It’s the perfect combination of sweet and salty. Yum! Full recipe is part of my Gardens That Grow pack.
GARDENS THAT GROW PRESCHOOL & PRE-K ACTIVITIES
I hope these ideas helped you fill-in your Garden lesson plans for your preschool classroom or homeschool! All of the printables for this unit can be found in my Gardens That Grow Preschool Activity Pack.
What types of garden preschool activities do you plan for your littles? Do you have any fun activities that would be great to add to this list? Comment below or find me on Instagram [@littleslovelearningblog] and let me know!
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Happy Learning!
