We’ve been painting today. Huge pieces of paper, any paint colours we wanted, inside and outside. The sun shone, the children daydreamed and ideas appeared on paper.
If you’re wondering what you might do with your children this weekend: paint! It’s joyful, colourful, uplifting, relaxing, inspiring and such a pleasure. Here are my three golden rules for happy children’s painting, and 55 ideas you could try to give your painting a boost this week. Read more »
The Garden Classroom: 52 kids gardening activities ebook is now published and available for you to buy.
The Garden Classroom brings you fifty-two creative and playful activities, giving you a whole year’s worth of garden-based projects to enjoy with your children. Come rain or shine, and whatever the season, there are ideas you can use to give your children a connection to nature all year round.
With ideas for bringing art, craft, science, math, literacy and play to your outdoor space I think you will love The Garden Classroom. Take a look at this video and I’ll show you some of the ideas from the book.
Why you’ll love The Garden Classroom
:: The Garden Classroom gives you a year’s worth of resources you can use to give your children a connection with nature. You will have activities to teach science, math, and literacy using the outdoors as your classroom. You will also have clever and creative ideas to enjoy arts, crafts and play with your children.
:: It’s filled with beautiful, full-color photographs bringing each activity to life and clearly showing you each project. It’s a pleasure to read and practical: let your children browse through the pages and pick their favorite project, then print off the individual pages and you’re ready to start.
:: Suitable for children aged from two through to ten, every activity in the book has been tried, tested and approved by children – my own daughters, the children I have worked with in my home day-care setting, and those in the school gardening project that I run.
:: Covering all seasons, and all weathers, there’s a project you could try today, and enough ideas to last you all year long. You can decide to do an activity each week, or group them together as a block of learning.
:: No gardening expertise is required! The book gives you lots of tips to grow flowers, fruit and vegetables with your children. Many of the activities are centred on enjoying the outdoors and using whatever outdoor space you have – whether that’s a large garden, a tiny plot like my own, a school garden area, a window box or even your local park or woodland. The projects don’t have to all be done outside either – most of them will work just as well within a classroom setting.
:: Every activity is clearly laid out with beautiful photographs and step-by-step instructions. It includes many ideas to vary the projects and extend them to suit your own children’s ages, stages and interests.
:: The ebook will be delivered as soon as you place your order, via e-mail as a downloadable pdf document. This allows you to browse the book on your computer and select the activities you want to try first. You can choose to print the whole book, for reference or to add in to your planning files. You can also print individual projects, so you have the step-by-step guides for each activity to take with you into the garden or classroom.
Just $9.99 for 52 fun, creative and educational activities. That’s around £5.60 for UK readers and as the book is bought via paypal you can buy a copy wherever you are in the world. Click the button below to get your copy of The Garden Classroom e-book right now as an instant download which you can begin to use straight away.
The book will be sent to the e-mail address associated with your paypal account. The delivery system gives you 5 attempts at download within 120 hours, so you can buy now and do the download a little later if you prefer.
Once you’ve got your copy, head over to my facebook page and let me know which activity you pick to try first!
We’re having so much fun exploring all the kids gardening activities we can come up with using chalk this week. Taking One Added Ingredient and introducing it to lots of different areas of play gets children thinking and imagining and creating. Using a material they are familiar with ~ in our case chalk ~ but adding it in different ways leads to all sorts of new play possibilities. On Monday I showed you how we’d use chalkboard paint to make some ever changing puppets, in our fairy garden and in a road map right across the patio. Today we’re using chalk in a treasure hunt that mixes in lots of language, maths and nature play too.
Kids gardening activities : chalk treasure hunt Read more »