Garden Planning For Kids, Kids Printable Garden Planner Activity

Every year the kids are in the garden with us. This year I decided to create a planner so that they could get a little more involved with the planning process.

There are several ways you could prepare this planner activity. We used it pin map style. This planner includes grid paper - each square represents one square foot of garden, or one square inch of a planter. I printed our first one on white paper.  We have changed things up because this is an ongoing activity in our house, and are now using brown construction paper. You can grid that if you wish, or print on brown paper. You could also use brown felt and grid it, or just use it as is. You could cut out the images and labels, and glue them down onto your garden paper, or you could even print them onto a magnetic sheet and use a magnet board!!

Lot's of ideas to customize this to meet your needs. We liked the idea of pins for planting standing plants.

We went outside and measured our garden. We counted and taped together the number of sheets/squares required to create the size of our garden. This provided another opportunity to discuss the calculation of area.

I use quilt pins for pin map pieces, with the big flat yellow disks on top. I simply tape them to the back of labels. I like this because the pins have a large surface area at the top for the tape to adhere to. I can also easily remove them and just use the pieces should we wish to. I did laminate our pieces.

We have since revamped the entire planner activity! It now includes Parts of a Plant 3 Part Cards, Garden Tools 3 Part Cards, Garden Terms and definition Cards. 

Xander is using double sided tape to create our garden grid.

Here he is reading our seed packets, lot's of new vocabulary!! He compared seed packets, and we noted the differences in descriptions and symbols used for planting. We talked about spacing and depth of planting for various types of seeds.

Ava was much more random in her planting choices, while Xander was in planning mode.

He read and labelled our veggies.

We had a ruler out to talk about depth and spacing. We took a sheet of paper and wrote down our plan to take out to the garden. I do like the cut and paste method because you could just take that outside.  My plan however was to have the activity available to be repeated.

Ava is matching our pin map pieces to our seeds.

So we headed out to the garden with our plan!!

We strung all of our rows for planning, so we could easily see where we had planted.

Let the planting begin!!

Planting is hard work, so a little swim break was in order:)

Back to planting!! We built obelisk style trellises for the peas and beans.

Back to relax after a job well done!!!

We have covered lots of botany work that you can check out below, and will cover much more ongoing in the future. These are a couple of great books we keep out with out planner activity.

Oh Say Can You Seed?: All About Flowering Plants (Cat in the Hat's Learning Library)

The Jumbo Book of Gardening (Jumbo Books)

This is a fantastic book that I am planning some summer activities from for Botany study. Janice VanCleave's books are recommended in our Montessori Research & Development manuals. She has written a number of amazing science books filled with experiments and activities for children.   

Janice VanCleave's Plants: Mind-Boggling Experiments You Can Turn Into Science Fair Projects (Spectacular Science Project)

This is a set of garden matching / 3 part cards from here. These are part of a Gardening Pre School pack filled with cute activities.

We also bought some fantastic kids garden tools from Lowe's this year. We have went through so many, but these are very durable!! They have loved using them!!

http://www.lowes.com/ProductDisplay?partNumber=22876-70484-75250&langId=-1&storeId=10151&productId=3025808&catalogId=10051&cmRelshp=rel&rel=nofollow&cId=PDIO1

 Our kids Set of hand tools are this brand though I did not buy them here...can't remember!

http://www.shop.com/Ray+Padula+Grow+With+Me+Kinder+Gardening+Tube+O+Tools-656756762-p+.xhtml

If you would like a copy of our planner you are welcome to check it out at our shop!

I would love to hear about what you are doing in the garden with your kids!!

If you would like to visit a couple of larger Botany posts and see what we were doing you can head to the links below.

http://makingmontessoriours.blogspot.ca/2012/03/botany-1-montessori-botany-cabinet-work.html

http://makingmontessoriours.blogspot.ca/2012/03/botany-2-montessori-leaf-cabinet-work.html

Thanks for visiting with us!

This post is linked up at Living Montessori Now Montessori Monday!!!