Get Your Kids in the Garden
and Outdoors!!

TVs, video games, computers--are they keeping your children indoors, even in beautiful weather? Exploring a garden is a great way to learn about the natural world. It encourages creative, imaginative play, and sparks curiosity. The outdoors is a world worth exploring, and what better way to relate to your child but to explore it together. Curiosity leads to learning and learning children are rarely bored.

Here are some things you can do to encourage your children to explore the garden and the great outdoors.

1. Make a summer scrapbook together. Visit parks and gardens and take photos, make drawings, and collect other reminders of your visits and put them in your scrapbook. Write down any questions your children ask on their summer adventures, and look for the answers together. Include plants, animals, the weather, the environment and the history of the place you visit. This is a summer long project that a whole family can enjoy. It uses outdoor time for exploring and indoor time for research and decorating the journal. It is also something to show friends and relatives when they visit.

2. Let your children have a small section of the garden as their own. Ideally, choose a spot where you can watch from a window. Try to put up a border of some sort to set boundaries for your kids. Use a simple design, but let the children have a say in what the garden, within the boundaries, will look like. Take the climate and garden conditions into account. Boundaries and paths can be outline in stones, bark mulch or small fences. Let your children sketch out what they would like the garden to look like. A simple circle is always fun--slice them up like a pie with paths meeting at the middle, and each section having a different plant. Another simple design is to divide small squares (about 1 ft)  with paths, and plant each square with a different plant.

Use plants that are easy to grow. Sunflowers are always easy and very impressive. Kids love extremes, huge flowers, bright colors, etc. Make your choice of plants taking your gardening region into consideration. Scented plants help the imagination, herbs can be fascinating with different smells, textures, and blossoms. Show your children how to grow their own veggies, and watch them be more enthused about eating them. Let them harvest the herbs, rubbing the leaves to smell what will spice up their veggies for dinner! Some flowers bloom at night like nicotania. It is a great experience to go outside at night with a flash light in search of a new blossom. These are things they will remember forever. Decorate your table with cut flowers from the garden. Easy to grow flowers are cosmos, snapdragons, zinnias, coleus and salvia. Let your children gather the flowers, with your help, depending on their age.

3. To show your children how water is pulled up the stem of a flower, collect some daisies or use celery sticks. Place them in jars of water with food coloring added to them. After a few hours, the daisy petals will change color, as will the celery stalks.

4. Roll a paper towel into a cylinder and place inside a jar. Wet the towel so it sticks to the glass. Place seeds of beans, radish, corn or squash between the towel and the jar. Put an inch of water in the bottom of the jar to keep the towel moist. Place jar in a well-lighted warm room, out of direct sunlight. Let children record dates of planting and germination. If handled carefully, these seeds can be planted out in the garden later.

5. The next time you are cooking with eggs, crack them carefully so that you can save the lower two-thirds of the shell intact. Save the carton as well. Wash carefully and dry the egg shells. You can then let your children draw faces on the shells with markers. Fill the shells with potting soil or place a damp piece of cotton wool at the bottom of each shell. Sprinkle grass seed or cress seed into the soil or cotton and water gently. Put the egg shells in an egg carton and close the lid. Keep the eggs moist, but not soggy. After a few days, the seeds will sprout and your eggs with faces, will now have hair. You can either clip the hair, or let it grow long. Place them in egg cups and put them in a semi-sunny window.

6.Make a sponge garden. Collect different sizes and colors of sponges and cut them into different shapes. Moisten the sponges and sprinkle leaf lettuce, grass or cress seeds in the holes of the sponges. Keep the sponge garden in a shallow pan in a well-lit place. Keep moist but not soggy. If you add a light water-soluble fertilizer to the water, you may even grow enough of a crop to enjoy a salad.