Our family loves to garden, well my husband and I love it, and what parents love toddlers and young kids love. I have been teaching the plant life cycle in several lessons through out the last few months. I created hands on lesson plans and used a few of our favorite books to teach aspen. Aspen is also learning to read and write and larger numbers, so of course we incorporated these things into our lesson plans.
We started our seeds inside our home back in March, I let aspen pick out some of her favorite vegetables and fruits to plant, and used my favorite book Farm Anatomy to show her the different varieties of each vegetable or fruit. I tried to teach her why we garden, why we choose to use bio degradable starter pots, and what plants need to grow.
I created a checklist on a sheet for my girls, things that had to be done before we could plant our garden:
1.plant all the seeds
2. give them water daily
3. check weather daily to decide when they could go outside for sun and wind (above 60 degrees)
4. number which seeds sprouted first, so we know what vegetables we can save seeds from later this year.
5. give each plant fertilizer, taught the girls what plants need for food.
6. separate the plants into new garden pots when they were ready.
7. spread out compost and fertilizer in the garden, learn what is compost and why do plants need it?
Next weekend we shall be planting our garden.