Preschool Children’s Garden-Sensory Benefits of Gardening with Kids
This page may contain affiliate links. Learn More.
The garden has so many opportunities for kids to learn, but there are more sensory benefits of gardening with kids than we probably realize. There are many kids garden ideas you can do with your kids today.
Building a sensory garden takes just a few simple steps.
The sites, the sounds, the tastes, the smells in the garden. It’s one of the most memorable places to be because of all the sensory experiences kids can get in the garden.
There are unlimited textures for kids to explore in the garden. There are bumpy plants and smooth ones. Scratchy, shiny, pokey, fuzzy, cold, veiny, spiny and so much more. You can find it all in the garden!
The sounds in the garden have an unlimited array. Birds chirping, animals scratching, wind chimes chiming, leaves rustling, wind blowing through the plants and so much more.
The smells in the garden vary immensely. There are sweet smells, floral scents, sour smells, earthy fragrances, even squash bugs, ladybugs and other insects put off a smell. The smell of tomato plants is a fond fragrance for me. Smell has huge sensory benefits.
Sight has a great variety in the preschool garden. You can find every color imaginable, varied hues of pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, greens for days, blues, and violets. Black, white, grey, brown, there isn’t a color you can’t find in the garden. The garden also offers unlimited shapes to see and images that kids won’t forget for a lifetime.
Obviously, taste is a big sensory experience in the children’s garden. You can taste sweet, sour, savory, salty, and such a variety of each. Tasting in the garden helps kids learn to love a huge variety of foods. That’s a wonderful benefit.
Sensory benefits in the preschool garden
The benefits of growing a children’s garden with your preschoolers is unlimited. And preschool is that magic time when kids are big enough to do things in the garden that can be a help and still young enough for their brains to be at that plastic sponge-like stage where they absorb knowledge like mad.
Sensory garden plants
Some great plants for a sensory garden for preschool would include a variety of colors such as dark purples, yellows, oranges and reds. Carrots, eggplant, tomatoes, and many plants come in purple varieties. Bright yellow plants include yellow squash and many more. Bright orange plants such as carrots are fun. Radishes come in a rainbow of colors just like carrots do. Tomatoes come in yellow, orange, pink, purple, green and obviously red. Use your imagination when choosing colors. Also think about plants in a variety of sizes and shapes.
Some great smell sensory plants could include sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, lemon verbena, pretty much any herb. Also, tomatoes have a strong smell as well as cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower. Lavender has an amazingly comforting smell. Flowers in the garden make a wonderful fragrance as well.
Obviously, flavors will run the gamut in the garden, so there’s no trouble finding variety there. Some super fun leaves you can use for touch are lavender, the furry lamb’s ear, the big pokey squash leaf and many more. You can shop the seedlings in the garden center to find a variety of textures of leaves.
You’ll find the more you garden with kids in the children’s garden, the more ideas you’ll have of ways kids can learn from the garden.
For more articles on gardening with preschoolers, check this out:
Check out all these sensory activity ideas for daycare too.
