Preschool Corner: Gardening Unit

Tornado is 4 years 4 months
Sweet Pea is 3 years 1 month

We've been working on a garden unit the last few weeks. (Thanks Jolanthe for the activities!)

We read plenty of fun books!


In addition to the reading and talking we did about gardening, I worked in the Parable of the Sowers as our Bible focus. There is a pdf story available online here that we really enjoyed!!

Then we used Jolanthe's garden activities a number of times too!

Tornado put these numbers in order 1-20 (the picture was after we started cleaning them up... sorry!) and then we hid the trowel under them. Couldn't fool him. He looked for which one sat higher than the rest. I call that problem solving!!!

Sweet Pea is still working on her colors and shapes so these cards are great! We'll probably keep them out longer than the rest.

This is the first time we've used anything like these "first sounds" cards. Tornado loved them! And did a great job!


We tried these matching "vocabulary" cards for the first time too. He's getting pretty good with his reading, so I put all the word cards on one side and the picture cards on the other side. He sounded out the words and found the pictures to go with.



Sweet Pea worked on her number recognition 1-5 and Tornado started learning how to add with these great addition pages from Confessions of a Homeschooler. He loved them and is really getting the concept. Often the mistakes he makes are because of miscounting.

Here he worked on sequencing the growth of a flower and putting together a flower and labeling the different parts.
And tracing... and then erasing. Ok... Sweet Pea really just scribbled on our 1-20 chart.


These are some fun blocks we found for $5 at the thrift store. They are for making mazes to use a marble with, but until we have a marble to use, we are using them as blocks. This past week I introduced the "dominos" concept... very exciting. I even found Tornado doing it with clothes pins later in the day.


And to go with our good soil lessons we planted seeds in "good soil" and in sand to see what would happen.

And a week later, we have a seedling in the good soil. (Sorry about the blur!)


And that's it for our garden unit I think. Have you been doing anything special for spring???