Gardening and Plant Theme for Preschool
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Teaching a plant theme for preschool is a great way to teach kids lots of science as well as give them sensory experiences. Kids love to watch things grow. There are many kids garden ideas you can do with your kids today.
Nature activities are hands on brains on for kids.
Another great lesson plan for preschool.
You can make your theme as simple as germinating a few seeds or take it all the way to a huge garden. Anything you teach kids about plants is great. Kids can learn about botany, entomology, life cycles, photosynthesis, germination and so much more.
The best place to start with for a plant theme for preschool is with a few seeds. Get a few kinds of seeds from the store or from around your house. You can use pinto beans or black beans from the kitchen, an apple, check your spice cabinet for celery seed, cumin seeds or coriander, look at your dead flowers in the garden and pluck the seeds out of those.
There are a million places to find seeds to explore. You can also get a few envelopes of seeds from the store if you prefer.
Plant lesson plans for preschoolers
Let kids sort different kinds of seeds and count them. They can also make patterns out of them. This is great for building math skills.
Give your kids a bunch of different kinds of seeds and let them create art. Give them a shape cut out and let them make a mosaic, give them a piece of paper and some glue and let them create a picture. Seeds are beautiful!
Check out this super fun garden bingo game for kids!
Plant activities for preschool-germination
Teaching kids about germination just takes a little sandwich bag, a paper towel and a seed.
Talk about photosynthesis and how the leaves on the plant make food from sunlight. This teaches the kids why plants need sun to grow. Here is more information on photosynthesis and the science of flowers.
Plants need three things to grow, soil, sunlight and water. If you do a garden with the kids outside, you can do tons of science lessons about water. Click here to see how much water your garden needs.
Get a rain gauge and put it in the play area or garden and track how much rainfall you get. You can even make one. Click to see how.
For Printable Playdough Mats with 9 different insect lifecycles, check these out. So fun!
For garden activities for toddlers, check these out.
These Fall Nature Wands DIY are garden related and fun to make!
Gardening lesson plans for preschool
Grow plants on the window sill and measure and record information on their growth.
Learn about the parts of the plant, flower, stem, leaves and roots. Tell the kids what each one does.
Have the kids plant many kinds of seeds in egg cartons and see which ones sprout the fastest and which plants grow the tallest.
If you have a garden, help kids plant seeds and seedlings in the garden.
If you don’t have a garden, how about using a 5-gallon bucket outside with a few holes drilled in the bottom for a container to grow things in. You could grow a tomato plant (cherry tomato would be best), some radishes, some carrots, and a whole world of other choices in a bucket. Just make sure you get good potting mix and water it regularly.
Plants and gardening theme preschool
Do you want to get started with a garden, but you don’t know how? Here are some instructional videos you can get to help you learn the basics.
Plants theme preschool
For art, kids can draw flowers or vegetable plants. If you have a garden outside, take the kids out with their paper and let them draw what they see in the garden. If you don’t, use magazines and other pictures to show them the details and let them recreate them in their own way using their imagination.
Use playdough to sculpt flowers.
Dig up some worms outside and let the kids explore with them. Then give them playdough and let them make worms like they saw.
More garden math:
Count the petals on a flower, the sets of leaves on a vine, or other things you find in the garden.
Talk about bugs, what bugs are good for the garden and what ones are bad. Why are some good and some bad? What do bad bugs do?
You could do a bug theme like this one or a caterpillar and butterfly theme like this one. It’s our favorite! You can also study Grasshopper facts for kids too.
Poke three toothpicks into an avocado seed or a whole sweet potato and hang it on a short glass. Fill the glass with water so half of the seed or potato is submerged. The sweet potato will grow sprouts our ‘slips” that can be planted in the garden and grow sweet potatoes. Click to see how to grow them once you have your slips.
The avocado seed will grow into a tree. Here in Oklahoma, we can’t grow them outdoors, but you can grow them as a houseplant.
Fingerplays and songs for preschool garden and plant theme
Fuzzy Caterpillar
The fuzzy caterpillar
Was climbing up a tree
He wiggled short, he wiggled long, he wiggled back at me
I put him in a box
Don’t go away I said,
But when I opened up the box,
A butterfly instead
This is the Way We Plant the Seeds…
(Mulberry Bush)
This is the way we plant the seeds,
Plant the seeds, plant the seeds.
This is the way we plant the seeds,
Early in the springtime.
- 5 Little Speckled Frogs
- Ladybird, Ladybird
- Daffodils
- 5 Little Ducks
- 5 Little Peas in a Pod
- This is My Garden
- The Farmer Plants the Seeds
- The Planting Song
Dramatic play is such an important part of learning!
For Printable Playdough Mats with 9 different insect lifecycles, check these out. So fun!
Garden theme preschool
Make flower art, such as a popcorn flower, a cupcake liner flower, a coffee filter flower, let the kids create flowers how they want them to look.
Some of my favorite garden books for kids that help with the plant theme are:
- Growing Vegetable Soup
- The Little Red Hen
- Flower Garden
- Growing a Rainbow
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Let kids use child-sized gardening tools, like gloves, wheelbarrows, and shovels to do garden work.
Your plant theme can go right into a nutrition theme as well, such as this one.
If you grow some food in the garden, you can harvest it and use it to make friendship soup like we did here.
There are several plant activities in the Healthy Kids Fun Pack you can get free by subscribing to the blog. Click to sign up. You get vegetable color sheets, recipes for veggies and so much more.
Flower theme for preschool
The garden offers a ton of sensory experiences. If you grow plants, smell the leaves, crush them between your fingers, feel their textures, see their colors and growth, even taste them if they are safe to eat.
If you grow plants outdoors, it opens up a world of sensory experiences that are amazing. You can even plant an easy sensory garden.
You can even grow a living teepee!
There are so many things you can do to make your plant and garden theme as simple or as complicated as you want but there is so much in growing things that teaches kids. You’ll learn as much as they do and that makes teaching more fun! Here are some great ideas for Home Daycare Curriculum. Such as this Daycare Lesson Plans on “The Secret Garden”.
