The Benefits of Gardening With Your Child

Your garden is a space for lots of family fun, and provides the opportunity for your little one to learn and grow. Through being outdoors, your child can understand more about the world they live in, get active and have fun whilst gardening. So, if you’re ready to get outside with your family, here are some of the advantages of gardening with your kids. 

Educational and fun

According to the Kiddi Caru Gardening with Children blog post, encouraging your child to have a hand in growing plants provides them with a front row seat to the life cycle, as well as seeing what the plants need to grow. 

Through planting different shrubs and flowers, your little one can understand how the leaves change colour as the seasons change, or how the soil absorbs water which is needed for the plants to grow, for example. 

Encouraging them to get involved in gardening with seeds, fruit and vegetables, will also help your child to understand where our food comes from and what is needed to have a healthy lifestyle. This can also help with those picky eaters, as they may be more willing to try the new food and ingredients that they have grown themselves. 

Being active

Getting outdoors is the perfect way to get your child to stretch their legs and use up some energy. The physical activity of digging soil and planting seeds can get the whole family up and moving, but there’s also the added benefit of improving their fine motor skills through any intricate work or by using gardening tools. 

You can even get them their own set of mini gardening tools that are brightly coloured and child friendly to use. Start with their own watering can, that they can fill and hold, and distribute the water around the garden. It can be so much fun seeing the sprinkling of water magically come out of the end of the watering can, as well as getting your child to spend more time outside and be more physically active. 

Exploring the sense

Children learn and explore the environment around them by using all five senses, and the garden is full of elements of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell to educate and delight. 

You can make the garden colourful through the different flowers you plant, or by including coloured pots and containers. You can even encourage your child to paint their own plant pots to include in your garden, to stimulate their sense of sight, encourage their artistic side and expand their knowledge of colours. 

The garden is also the perfect place to explore a variety of smells. Not only can flowers have a nice perfume, but you can also plant a range of herbs with your little one, to explore the exciting smells that come with them. Try mint and lavender, and together touch and smell the different elements of the plant to see what aromas they can discover. 

Let’s not forget about sound! Including plants and bushes of varying textures will mean they will rustle or move in the wind, and create unique sounds. A great activity for you and your child can include getting in the garden and writing a checklist of all the different sounds you can hear, whether that’s the crunching of leaves or the tune of a bird singing. There’s lots to learn and explore in your own back garden with your child. 

*This is a collaborative post