Garden Over Time

Materials:

Nature Journal, drawing utensils of choice, and a garden to observe

Optional Materials:

Soil, seeds, and pot or flower bed to grow your own plants in.

Activity:

Visit a vegetable or flower garden you can return to or keep a potted plant you can watch grow throughout the season. Go to the “changes over time” section of your nature journal and label the top “Garden over time” then fill in the date in one of the narrow boxes and return every week or two to make observations on the plant growth.

Younger: 

Ask them questions about what they think will happen next or how much it will grow between now and the next observation.

Older:

Collect measurements of growth with a ruler and write the data with their drawings.

Take it Further:

Do a mini-lesson on the plant life cycle. Keeping a garden is incredibly rewarding, especially for children. If you can, it is a great way to see biology in action. A neatly contained ecosystem with plants, animals, growth, decomposition. There are so many amazing life lessons and character-building opportunities they get through this project. If you can’t though don’t worry, they will still get a lot of natural education from watching a single plant grow and fruit over time. A really fun book full of rabbit holes to explore is “It all starts with a seed” by Emily Bone (Usually cheaper through an Usborne consultant than on Amazon)