It’s that time of year again to plant some seeds! Planting Seeds in Preschool is such a wonderful hands-on experience for children! I love that it doesn’t have to be a big production to be meaningful. Just a small bean seed or a little container for soil and grass seeds! Both of these offer quick and exciting results.
Planting Seeds in Preschool
My group was so excited to do this little project. Everyone was visibly excited and engaged in this activity from Mother Goose Time – simple planting grass seeds in a small cup. It was over much too quickly so we also planted a larger pot of marigold seeds using seeds I had saved from our flowers last year. Most of the children are able to remember the orange flowers we had in our planter last year so this was a meaningful cycle for them to understand the seeds could be saved and planted again.
I set out two trays and worked with two children at a time to reduce the chaos and the mess! I’m not sure why we didn’t do this outdoors but it may have been rainy since we had many of those days this May…
They were anxious to get started and you could see their little eyes taking in all the supplies and their minds processing what to do first and next, which resulted in their hands quickly.
In an effort to slow down the process so it could be done appropriately and meaningfully, I asked them to identify the items we would be using.
Then other questions like, “What does a seed need to grow?” “What should we do first?”
“Is that enough soil?”
“How many seeds should we plant?”
Some used the spoons and some used their hands. It’s important to offer tools and be flexible. It all works!
This little one was frustrated with the time it was taking to squeeze the pipette and water her seeds so she picked up the jar and poured. Great!
The pipettes for watering slows down the process and prevents the flooding of the seeds plus works on the fine motor skills we need practice with.
We compared the grass seeds and marigold seeds. Marigold flower seeds are colorful like the blooms.
It didn’t take long to see tiny sprouts! It will take longer for the marigolds to grow but that will be fun to watch too. Every day we check to see if they need to be watered.
The grass grew quickly and soon needed to be cut. That’s the fun part!
For some reason, this one didn’t grow as much. He certainly had enough seed in it! Maybe this was the one that got dumped and the seeds ended up all mixed in? That’s part of the learning process in planting seeds in preschool. It’s on going learning through a little seed planted in soil that we can watch and observe for many days and weeks to see what happens.
He helped the younger ones who needed assistance cutting. We hope the grass grows again so we can cut it again!
Such a fun sensory and fine motor experience! Cut grass smells good.
Now we wait for the grass to grow long again.
More gardening posts to come!