How does your garden grow?

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By Sally Gray — Early Years teacher and writer

Create a colourful garden display as a focus for learning about growing plants

Interactive garden display

Make a collection of books and posters about gardens, garden animals and gardening, such as Eddie’s Garden by Sarah Garland (Frances Lincoln) and Winnie’s Amazing Pumpkin by Valerie Thomas (OUP Oxford). Share them with the children and talk about the range of plants and animals that you might expect to live and grow there. Have the children ever helped to grow anything in their own gardens? Be sensitive to individual circumstances.

Invite the children to help make a large garden display on the wall. Ask the children to choose their favourite items from the books and get their ideas on how they would like to recreate them for the display, for example, with paints, collage materials, felt-tipped pens and so on. Add green backing paper to the display wall and, over time, make the garden grow and expand with plants, trees, flowers and hedges. Encourage the children to make some garden creatures such as worms, butterflies, bees and birds. Attach them at child height, using Blu-Tack®, so that the children can play with them, move them around, hide them and so on. Provide a recording of bird and garden sounds to use as background music for the display. Place the music player within the children’s reach for them to operate.

Suggested resources

Garden books and posters; recordings of garden and bird sounds; green backing paper; assortment of paper and card; collage materials; paints; colouring and drawing materials; fabric in garden colours.