If you are looking for some preschool activities now that spring has sprung, you could do worse than get them out in the garden sowing seeds and growing edible plants. In fact if your little one is at Pear Tree or Pirbright Day Nurseries in Surrey they’ll be able to show you how, because this is what they’ve been doing at nursery.
Planting and Growing Activities
We’ve been lucky with the weather recently and have been able to get everyone outside enjoying our gardening activities. We’re particularly keen to sow and plant foods so that not only do the children get to experience caring for our seedlings and watching the plants grow, but they will also get to eat them later in the year!
Already we’ve been sowing seeds in our raised beds, as well as some plant pots, and will continue this over the next few weeks. We’re growing strawberries, tomatoes and runner beans and also some herbs like basil and thyme, creating a truly sensory garden in the process.
Of course no children’s garden would be complete without the smiling faces of sunflowers, so sunflower seeds have also been sown: the competition for the tallest is now on!
Learning Activities for Preschoolers
We’ve also been learning about honey bees and how honey is made. Everyone enjoyed playing Isn’t It Funny How a Bear Likes Honey. If you don’t know this one, it makes a great children’s party game, here’s how:
Choose one child to be the “bear” and they sit in the centre of the circle of other children, with a musical instrument such as sleigh bells next to them. All the other children chant:
“Isn’t it funny how bears like honey, buzz, buzz, buzz.
I wonder why he does.
Go to sleep Mr Bear, don’t peep Mr Bear.”
The child in the centre then pretends to go to sleep and one of the other children grabs the bells, shakes them loudly, and hides them behind their back. At this point everyone shouts “Wake up Mr Bear, someone has stolen your honey!” Now the child in the centre has to try and remember where the sound of the bells came from and guess which child is hiding them. Repeat until everyone has had a turn.
Continuing the planting and growing theme at Pirbright Day Nursery we have transformed our homecorner into a Garden Centre, filling it with all the equipment needed to develop our learning about growth and the environment around us. During circle time we also talked about the vegetables that grow in the garden. We’ve got lots of budding Monty Dons and Sarah Ravens amongst our gardening crew!
Simple Ideas to Try at Home
It doesn’t matter if you haven’t got much outdoor space, you can still do some growing activities at home. How about growing Cress Heads? We always use an empty egg shell from a hardboiled egg for this one. Try to preserve as much of the shell as possible so that you have a smallish hole at the top for the hair!
- First carefully draw a face on your eggshell or use stickers, googly eyes etc. to make one.
- Put a wad of cotton wool inside the shell and pour enough water on it to wet it.
- Sprinkle your cress seeds on top in a thin layer.
- Make sure the cotton wool doesn’t dry out.
- Put your Cress Head into an egg cup or open egg box and wait for the “hair” to grow!
If you have any growing ideas you can share with our readers and other parents, please use the comments below. We’ll be sharing more activities from our gardens later in the year.