How to homeschool in the Garden
Kids love working and helping in the garden but with a bit of thought, you can turn the garden into your classroom. the garden is —-full of lessons.
By including your children in your gardening you are opening up plenty of time to work one on one together and so many lessons can be learned inside the garden.
:: Arm your children with a few fun garden tools, let them help select plants that will be their projects. (We have pink lemons and a banana plant picked by the kids this month to add to our garden.)
:: Children can learn about life cycles and ecosystems while in the garden, from earthworms to honey bees the amount of insects your child can get to know is amazing. A bug house can help attract more beneficial bugs to your garden.
:: A Fun Bug Guide can get even the most reluctant-to-read boys excited to read and learn. Discovering and learning about each bug makes a great classifying activity.
:: Building garden beds and planting rows of seeds makes a great hands-on math lesson. Simple things like collecting pebbles and dividing them among pos can work fine motor skills as well as work as basic math drills.
:: Learn how food is grown and each step from seed to table by building a veggie garden or growing your child’s favorite fruits. Have fun and supplement and lower your grocery bill while teaching the kids.
:: Garden chores teach children responsibility and the occasional natural consequence (pun intended) can teach your child to remember chores before a pet joins the family and they learn the hard way about daily care.
:: The perfect companion to weather study. As a gardener you have to understand the weather and how it affects your garden, from drought to the next downpour, strong winds or hot sun your child can see how the weather affects living things and learn how to do things like add more water on hot summer days.
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Well, we didn’t call it that 50 years ago! But I did learn some of those valuable lessons working in the garden as kid. One other thing I learned–Free Enterprise! When the garden did well and we had extra, my Dad let me sell corn, beans, peas and tomatoes to a near by neighborhood! It was a nice source of spending money for a kid!
Yes, totally agree!
My sister had my nieces working in the garden and then her granddaughters. Lovely to watch them learn, even with raspberry bushes by the side of her house.
Amy
My son (10) has been gardening for 3-4 years. He started growing tomatoes, then peppers, and this year we also tried cucumbers. Fail on the cucumbers (we got ONE). But should have lots of tomatoes (big boy, cherry, and grape) and peppers (bell and jalepeno) soon.
Excellent post! Great ideas on how to mesh homeschooling & the garden. LOVE it! Came over from FB Follow your feet share.