Gardening Theme Art Projects

On March 25, 2016March 25, 2016 By aprilzajkoIn Early Childhood Education, NatureLeave a comment

Thumbprint Flowers on a Canvas Bag – perhaps my favorite teacher gift ever was this lovely bag with the names and thumbprints of all my students that year. It’s a treasured keepsake and would also make a wonderful end of the year gift for all the children to receive. (Perhaps make onto t-shirts instead of bags?)

Handprint Sunflowers — on large paper pre-draw a 3-4 inch circle. Help kids paint one hand yellow and make 5-6 handprints around the circle forming a sunflower. Pour on some white Elmer’s glue and glue down real sunflower seeds in the center of the circle. Add green stems and create a wonderful bulletin board display of all the children’s hands.

Watercolor Sunflowers- cut out a sunflower shape, paint with liquid watercolor paints in yellow and orange, then glue on real sunflower seeds. Create the stem with a couple different green colored crepe paper. These make a beautiful classroom display!

Egg Carton Flowers – pre-cut individual egg cups from cardboard egg cartons and thread green pipe cleaners into the cups to form a stem. The children can paint the outside of the cups with watercolor paint and then add tissue paper to the inside of the cups using white glue. Add leaves to the stems too. (Great tool for teaching about parts of a plant)

Beans & Grain Mosaics – cut out small squares from corrugated cardboard. In small cups, color Elmer’s glue several different shades. Have the kids make mosaics by coating their cardboard with glue designing it with different grains (wheat, rice) and dried beans (black, kidney, lima, etc.)

Bean Mosaic Sun-catchers – lay a small plastic lid on the table, fill the lid with Elmer’s glue, and lay in a variety of seeds. Make a pattern or design or just put in a variety. Allow to dry overnight. Pop it out of the lid, make a small hole in the dried glue, and add a ribbon so you can hang it in a window.

Stamping with Root Vegetables – prior to the kids arriving, cut potatoes cut into various shapes, cut carrots just using the ends, use the end of the celery & cut turnips in half. Adding popsicle sticks may make the printing easier. Show kids how to dip or paint the stamps and then press onto the paper. Using grocery bags, cut out one side that is print free. Kids stamp to create a garden picture. (In the fall, we do the same project but cut out a cornucopia shape to stamp onto.)

Collage Gardens – kids cut pictures from gardening magazines and seed catalogs and arrange them onto paper into their “Dream Gardens”

Soda or Water Bottle Flowers – use the bottom of plastic bottle to dip into paint or a very wet ink pad, stamp onto paper. Add stems and leaves to make the prints look like flowers.

My Garden Plans – precut paper shapes to resemble garden veggies, kids glue them onto graph paper to make a square foot garden plan.

Shaving Cream Prints spread shaving cream on trays and provide liquid water colors to drip on top. Kids swirl the paint then press a piece of paper on top to make a print. {Paper can be cut into shapes such as flowers, veggies, or trees.}

Tree or Plant Paint Blotto: Day one -fold cardstock in half and drip paint onto one side and press together. Let dry. The next day kids can add details with more paint or add collage materials.

Beaded Flowers –need pipe cleaners, beads in bright colors, and flower cookie cutters to form the shapes. Children add beads to the pipe cleaners then make the flower design by molding along the outside of the cookie cutter. Add a hanger using either dental floss or fishing line.

Painting Coffee Filter Flowers with Ice Cubes – freeze several trays of ice cubes & food coloring or paint with a popsicle stick in it. Show the children how to hold the stick and ‘paint’ with the melting ice cube. Precut the coffee filters for the children or leave as a whole circle. Once dry, add a green pipe cleaner stem.

Glitter Flowers or Plants – Have kids create thick lines of glue on wax paper (or laminate scraps). Use a q-tip or toothpick to make a plant or flower design. Sprinkle with glitter and let dry.

Spin Art Painting – using a salad spinner, lay down a thick piece of paper such as card stock. Drizzle in watered down tempera paint. Put on lid and let kids spin. Check and add more paint, if desired! The paper could be pre-cut into flower shapes.

Bubble Wrap Print Making – cut flower & plant shapes from bubble wrap, brush on paint and then stamp onto paper. Experiment with different sized bubble wrap — jumbo to tiny! Tape the bubble wrap to the table so it’s stationary and you are only moving the paper.

Check out my Pinterest board for more information about gardening with children:

Favorite Plants for Children

On March 25, 2016March 25, 2016 By aprilzajkoIn Gardening, NatureLeave a comment

*Involve the children in picking out the seeds or plants! Their sense of ownership and excitement for gardening is amplified when they are decision makers in what is planted.

* Keep kids involved in ALL steps — selecting, buying, planting, caring & harvesting! Include composting too so children see the full cycle. One of my children’s favorite job is turning the soil and adding fresh compost to the garden bed. It’s fun to see that rich dark soil and imagine all the wonderful things that will grow there!

Indoor plants spider plants, hens & chicks, Swedish ivy, African violets, Boston Ferns, and Venus Fly Traps are all great plants for kids to tend year-round. Indoor plants help improve the air quality and children benefit by caring for live plants.

Flowers — are always enjoyable because of their color and aroma, favorites include:

Geraniums – a favorite because they will bloom nearly all summer and are easy to overwinter indoors. I love that they even bloom indoors in the winter!

Marigold – easy to grow, come in wide variety of sizes and colors, and easy to dry & collect the seeds. I like to start marigolds in March to be ready as Mother’s Day gifts in May!

Sunflowers– easy to grow, select a variety of sizes from 3 foot to the Mammoth 12ft variety, lots of different colors. Observe them throughout the day to see how the flower moves to gather sunlight. When done flowering, cut off the flower head and dry for several weeks. Collect seeds by shaking them into a bag. Use to feed the birds or save for the next planting season.

Hollyhock– grows very tall and once established comes back year after year

Snapdragons – unique shape, imaginative name, and beautiful colors

Lambs Ear – is a fuzzy and soft plant that is silvery-green. Kids love to rub the velvety leaves!

Herbs — are fragrant, easy to grow, and most are perennials (which means they come back each year). Make a Pizza Garden with oregano, thyme, and basil. Dill is easy to sprout and the foliage is feathery and unique. Mints should be grown in a separate patch so it can grow untamed, just don’t plant too near to your garden because it can be invasive. Mint comes in a wide variety including orange, chocolate, lemon, and pineapple.

Vegetables — are wonderful to grow to show children where their food comes from. Often reluctant eaters will eat the vegetables that they have helped to grow. Favorites include lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, peas, beans, and pumpkins. Radishes are quick to grow and help satisfy kid’s eagerness to pick something!

Fruit — berries are a favorite for children. Strawberries are an early crop so consider having at least a few plants. Blueberries, black berries, and raspberries are wonderful to pick fresh with children. Once established you will be picking these for years to come. Think long term and plant an apple tree!

Children will enjoy the plants that you enjoy. Help them select a few and get their fingers into the soil!

Check out my Pinterest board for more information about gardening with children:

Gardening with Children: Tips & Tricks

On March 25, 2016March 25, 2016 By aprilzajkoIn Gardening, Nature1 Comment

Decide what you define as a successful garden.

If this is your first year gardening with children, my best tips is to start small so that the garden will be manageable and enjoyable. You do not want it to become one more chore and become a burden!

Make the garden a child-centered project by involving the kids in every step of the process. From selecting the plants in a gardening catalog, planting seeds, getting the soil read, planting, tending, and harvesting. Allow the children to be part of the entire process!
Take a field trip to select and buy plants. If that isn’t feasible, have children help you select plants by circling or cutting out pictures from a seed catalog.
If this is school or child care project, try to involve the families in your program by asking parents to each send in one or two plants for the garden, to volunteer to come in to plant, tend to the garden in the summer, and/or to help with the fall harvest.
Have the children help you prepare the pots or turn the garden, and then let them help you plant the seeds or plants.
Young children do better with larger seeds such as pumpkin, squash, sunflower, or corn. Tiny seeds will often end up clumped together, but you can always thin the seedlings later.
Children will help you maintain the garden if you help them see it as fun and enjoyable.
Keep kid tasks in the garden to 10 minutes. They will be more excited to help in small chunks of time, such as weeding for ten minutes in the morning and 10 more minutes at lunchtime, then asking them to do a repetitive task for longer.
Teach kids how to weed and how to recognize which plants to pull. Make a game of who can fill their bin first, and whoever gets their bin full helps the others.
Photograph and journal about the garden throughout the growing season. Keep these mementos out for the kids to view throughout the year so interest in gardening is maintained.

Sensory Exploration: Hearing

On February 23, 2016February 24, 2016 By aprilzajkoIn Early Childhood Education, Integrated Curriculum, Nature, SensoryLeave a comment

There are so many wonderful ways to explore our sense of hearing!

Outdoor Exploration: “Listening Walk” – guide the children in becoming still, closing their eyes, and listening for sounds for 20 or 30 seconds. Then try for 1 minute. Go longer if they are attentive. When my daughter was two she loved to play this game on our walks…mostly because we had lots of woodpeckers and she was an expert at hearing and then locating them! We would walk through our woods and stop and listen for sounds. She loved to be the first to point out a woodpecker or identify another sound in nature! Before going on the sound walk, read aloud the wonderful book The Listening Walk by Paul Showers.

“Bird Sounds” – encourage children to listen to the birds in the outdoors, try to see if you can figure out where the sound is coming from, and if possible, identify the bird. Young children enjoy mimicking the bird sounds, though their enthusiastic crow calls might scare off the rest of the birds! To learn more about bird sounds, consider downloading a bird call app and learn many of the bird calls in your area!

Try setting up some bird feeders outside your windows for the children to observe and listen carefully to their sounds. Children soon discover that the quieter they become, the louder the birds will become!

“Echo Game” – explain to the children what an echo is, and then have them echo some sounds or words that you make. Then the children spread out throughout the play space and you echo the sounds that each other makes. Pick someone to be ‘IT’ and then they pick the next child to be it. Try spreading out and seeing how it becomes more difficult to hear when the children are farther away.

“Listening to the Creek” – explain that the creek makes different sounds depending on the season. What does the creek sound like today? How would it be different in another season? We have discovered that at times it’s a quiet trickle and others a loud rushing ‘river’, and at other times the water actually runs underneath the ice and creates a muffled sound. Oh the opportunities to learn vocabulary in nature!

“Outdoor Sound Wall” – in the outdoor play area, create an interactive sound wall by hanging a variety of old pots, pans, metal lids, plastic containers, bells, wood blocks, different lengths and widths of pipes, hollow tubes, PVC pipes, and anything else that makes interesting sounds! Provide mallets or sticks for the children to use to create sounds. *Check Pinterest for additional ideas in creating a sound wall!

Gross Motor Games: “Follow that Noise” – the adults in the room each have some sort of noise maker in their pocket. The adults spread out, kids close their eyes, and one adult makes a noise. The kids are told to open their eyes and walk to the adult who they think made the sound. Once there, the children try to guess the sound. (Try: cricket clicker, jingle bell, keys, clap, snap, etc.)

“Bells on Boots” – tie a jingle bell onto each child’s boot laces. Then have the children dance, hop, stomp, and walk around the room or yard. Try a game of hide-and-seek with the bells on and talk about why it’s easy to find other kids when their bells shake.
An easy way to make these is to use small jingle bells, thread a twist tie through the hole on top, and then twist onto shoe laces. I find if you put the bell on the child’s zipper pull they will hold it and muffle the sound…which could be a whole other type of learning.

“Bubble Wrap Walk” – lay down a large section of recycled bubble wrap for children to run and jump on. What sounds do we hear?!

Dramatic Play: add instruments and dress up clothes and props so children can pretend to be musicians. Perhaps 80s Rock Stars?!

Science Center: “Sound Station” – create an interactive set of noise makers that the children can explore. Some ideas include: set of hand bells, clear rain stick, toy cell phone, cat “meow” or cow “moo” toy that makes sounds when you turn it upside down, toy microphone to amplifies, wooden or metal xylophone, wind chimes, jingle bells of various sizes, and a stethoscope. The sound station is usually of high interest but monitor the noise volume so it isn’t disturbing other children in the classroom.

Guided Activity – “Matching Sound Eggs Game”: Make two each of the sound eggs (plastic Easter eggs) before the children arrive. Children shake them and try to find the two that match. Contents include: dry beans, coins, corn kernels, salt, cotton balls, and paper clips.
Another option would be to use one container that was see-through and one that was not. Then the kids would have to match the sound but wouldn’t have to open the containers.

One year, we took our ‘sound eggs’ outside to play a version of Hide and Seek and “Matching Sound Eggs Game” together. Children come up with the best games don’t they!

Music: Listen to a variety of world music and try to identify some of the instruments. Compare the sounds to the instruments you have in class. Sing a song or chant a poem using an echo. One of my favorite echo songs to sing is “Down By the Bay”.

Fine Motor Skills: Instruments provide many new fine motor skills for children to explore. If possible, bring in a variety of instruments for children to strum, pluck and drum on. Practice using a mallet on tambourines, chimes, or xylophones. Boisterous jam sessions with a wide variety of percussion instruments build fine motor skills and teach about sound. Ask the children, “Can we make soft sounds, loud sounds, gentle sounds, wild sounds, etc! A keyboard with headphones is one great way for children to play without disturbing the rest of the group.

Language and Literacy: depending on the age of the children you are working with, there are a wide range of phonological awareness activities that you could incorporate into your “Hearing” activities. Check out the wonderful U.V.A. website for hundreds of activities for teaching Phonological Awareness including beginning sounds, blending, rhyme, and sound to letter segmentation! https://pals.virginia.edu/tools-activities.html

Writing Center: my preschoolers love using paper crimpers to make textured papers. I have a set of three crimpers and we discovered that each one makes a different sound! Another way to bring sound to the writing center would be to tie bells onto markers and pencils and children will create sound as they write!

Art Project: Rain Sticks using paper towel tubes that have tape on one end, let the children fill their tube with dried beans using a wide mouth funnel. Then the adult helps close the other end with tape. Paint, collage, or draw onto the paper tubes. Later add mod podge to make them more durable. If you are making these with just one or two children, you might consider poking toothpicks or pieces of popsicle sticks into the sides of the tube so that the ‘rainfall’ is even more pronounced! Just be sure to cover with felt or card stock so the sticks don’t pop back out.
Play Dough Center: Muffling Sounds with Play Dough – show children how to add beans or pebbles to plastic eggs. Compare the sounds of the eggs when one is covered in play dough and one is left plain. Why are there different sounds? Sound exploration with play dough – what else could we add to this activity to explore different sounds? Small jingle bells, metal washers, dried seed pods, etc.

Water Table: add objects that make noise. Take a variety of clear plastic containers and fill them with various objects (dice, sand, rice, mini jingle bells, beans, and cotton balls). Seal them with electrical tape and ask the kids to keep them sealed. Kids can scoop them out of the water and shake them. Making matching pairs would be another fun idea!
Sensory Table– dried beans as base, small container (plastic & tin) for the kids to scoop and fill, and then close to make shakers. One another day try adding a variety of crunchy & noisy objects – cellophane, wax paper, bubble wrap, painted paper.

Blocks & Building – add a few hand bells to see if children incorporate them into their building.

Math Activities –there are many ways that we can integrate exploring sound and learning math!

Clapping Patterns – children can working on repeating simple patterns by echoing the clapping and tapping patterns that the teacher makes. Begin with an easy pattern, such as “Clap, tap, clap, tap.” Encourage children to follow along, then ask a student to create a new pattern to copy. (Use as a transition activity!)

Count My Claps– explain to children that you want them to use their ears to count, so they need to close their eyes. Then clap a couple of times and ask children to show with their fingers how many claps you made. Practice with small numbers and then work towards larger numbers. Use instruments such as a drum or xylophone to count the beats!

One Duck Stuck – read the story “One Duck Stuck” by Phyllis Root and explain to children that they will help with the refrain, “Help, Help, Who Can Help?” and the other refrain “I can, I can”. Then practice verbally counting to 10 as the number of animals increase on the pages. After reading, use plastic animal counter to reenact the story. This book naturally lends itself to active participation with its excellent rhythm and is a great book to work on counting skills!

Guess My Sound – With their eyes closed, the adult makes a sound and the child guesses what made the noise. Try: clap, stomp, pretend sneeze, snap, whistle, cough. Instead of guessing the sound the kids could mimic the sound.

Family Connections: Encourage families to play a CD or recording of common sounds and then have the children guess the sounds. Create their own recording using a tablet or phone while outside and then have another family guess what the sounds are!

Thematic Healthy Snacks: Bring in an air popper and make fresh popcorn with the students. What sounds do we hear as the snack is popping?!

Circle Time Learning – Show a picture of the inside of the ear & explain briefly how our ears work. One important thing about our sense of hearing is learning how to change the volume of our voice, especially when we are indoors. Can you show me your indoor voice, how about your whisper voice, and your outdoor voice? Read aloud, Listening Time by Elizabeth Verdick (explains how to be a good listener at rug time) and reinforce how our sense of hearing is important in being a good listener, especially at circle time!

Online Resources for more ideas about Sound & Hearing:

Sound cups activity & kids making their own sound cups: http://www.playbasedlearning.com.au/2010/08/sound-cups/

Water & Music Play
http://childsplaymusic.com.au/2012/01/17/water-play-music-play-children-a-natural-combination/

Books for teaching about Hearing:

Hearing (The Five Senses) by Rebecca Rissman

Hearing Things by Allan Fowler

Listen, Buddy by Helen Lester

Listening Time by Elizabeth Verdick (explains how to be a good listener at rug time)

Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You: Dr. Seuss’s Book of Wonderful Noises by Dr. Seuss

Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bil Martin & Eric Carle

Shhh…A Book About Hearing by Dana Meachen Rau

Sound: Loud, Soft, High, and Low (Amazing Science) by Natalie M. Rosinsky

Sounds All Around by Wendy Pfeffer

Sounds My Feet Make by Arlene Blanchard

The Ear Book by Al Perkins

The Listening Walk by Paul Showers

Too Loud Lily by Sofie Laguna

Too Much Noise by Ann McGovern

Who Hears? by Anne Miranda (reference

Check out my Pinterest board for even more Five Senses teaching ideas!

April's Teaching Tree

Category: Nature

Gardening Theme Art Projects

Favorite Plants for Children

Gardening with Children: Tips & Tricks

Sensory Exploration: Hearing