Small Memories

If you’ve read my other articles about my childhood, you may remember how many good memories I attribute to my birding and gardening experiences with my mom. In the spirit of family gardening, I will be adding several activities which are great for children during the summer months.

As we have talked about in previous articles, flower gardening is a wonderful activity for your children. Even the youngest toddler is able to dig in the dirt and learns about texture from grabbing a handful of the warm brown granules. Preschoolers and older children also learn many things through the most simple tasks associated with flower gardening. Here are a few activities and suggestions to help you teach your child through flower gardening.

Make A Seed and Flower Book

The goal here is to make a book which contains a picture of the flower and an example of the seed. If you haven’t planted your summer flower garden yet, remember to save the paper packages that the seeds come in. For those of you who buy plants from the nursery, you can save the picture tags that come with your flowers. You will also want to save a few seeds which will be added to your book.

Make sure you use zip-lock bags or something to help you identify which seeds go with each packet. If you have already planted your flower garden, you may want to buy a few packets of seeds (things that you planted) just for your child and this activity.

Materials:

• 1 Ziplock bag for each kind of flower
• Empty seed packets - Cut picture of flower/plant on the front into neat rectangle
• 1 or 2 seeds from each seed packet. Store picture and matching seed in same ziplock bag
• 1 Sheet of colored construction paper
• White construction paper or copy paper - It’s good to have extra pages!
• Stapler and staples
• Markers or Crayons
• Clear packing tape (needs to be wide)
• Glue sticks (optional)
• Scissors

Directions for Basic Book:

• Stack all paper together neatly. Place on a table so that the long sides are on the top and bottom.
• Fold entire stack (all at once) from left to right. Pinch the fold with your fingers.
• Staple along the folded edge (about 4 staples in a line) approximately 1/2 to 1 inch from the edge. Make sure the staples catch the white paper.

There you have a basic book which can be used for many projects.

Adding Content to Pages:

Tell your child that you need help making a book.

• Think of a name for your book and write the title on the cover. You may also want to glue pictures to the cover.
• Pull out the flower pictures which you have already cut from the seed packets.
• Glue a flower picture on a page. Leave back of page blank.
• Get a seed that came from the package. Use the clear wide tape to secure the seed below the picture.
• Repeat glue-and-tape process for each picture and seed until you have matched each seed with it’s flower.

Book Activities

• Read the book with your child.
• Discuss what is seen in each picture.
• Describe the seeds
• Discussions to have and questions to ask - How many blue flowers are in this book? Red? Yellow? etc. How many are big? How many are small? How many have big leaves? How many have small leaves? Show me: the wrinkled seeds, smooth seeds, small seeds, large seeds,etc.
• Have your child draw a picture of the flower and/or the seed on a different sheet of paper.
• Call out a letter of the alphabet and ask your child to find that letter in the book.
• Use extra seeds to have your child match the seed in his hand (or from a seed box) to one in the book.

This is a cute trampoline game that lends itself to a variety of variations. Whether you are stressing eye-hand coordination when collecting the ants or drama with the expressions, it’s bound to beat your kid’s summer boredom!

Ants In My Bed!
For this trampoline game, you will need at least two players (see variation #3 for 1 player) and some small soft foam rubber balls (or balled up socks.) “Jimmy’ has an ant farm. Sometime during the night, they got out of their container and wound up in “Andy’s” bed. Jimmy awakes to hear Andy yelling and jumping on the bed (trampoline.) Jimmy tries to save his ants, by put them in a bag, before Andy bounces them all off the “bed.”

When there are no longer any ants in the bed, count the “saved” ants. Change roles. After both players have “collected the ants” see who saved the most ants. The one who saves the most ants wins.

To throw a little education into this activity, have the kids subtract to find out how many ants were saved and how many were lost.

Variation 1: If you use colored balls or socks, you can also have older children subtract to find out how many balls or socks of a particular color were saved and lost.

Variation 2: If you use all white socks and one pair of colored socks, the colored socks can be the queen and if the jumper (Andy) bounces the queen off, the game automatically ends because the colony will die without the queen.

Variation 3: If you only have one player on the trampoline, Mom or an adult can stand on the ground and put the balls on the trampoline while the child pretends to be asleep. When the adult says, “go,” the child “wakes up” and begins to jump. Then the adult uses a watch to find out how long it takes for the child to bounce all the “ants” off the “bed.”

This activity helps the kids learn subtraction and strategy skills. It’s also great fun for the kids to play and very humorous for adults to watch. Remember, watching is one of the six most important things you can do for your child in order to build great family memories!

More Resources:

Don’t forget to pick up a few trampoline-champion trophies here to remind you of all the fun had on the trampoline.