Garden Activities
During this nice weather we have spent time enjoying some garden activities. Here are some idea for the garden to keep children entertained for hours.
Stories
Setting up this tent with stories in is a great way to give children a cooling down area. They can rest and look at stories while being shaded from all the sunshine. adults can even get in there with the children and enjoy some stories while listening to the birds.
Baby Area
This area visually stimulating for those little ones that are not yet moving. This gives them a variety of things in a small space and gives them a choice of what to explore.
Blocks
This activity is great for all ages. The little ones explore colours and gain skill with their hand movements, not to mention the joy they get from knocking over towers that are build up.
For older children this encourages them to following instructions, as well as building up their own and exploring what they can achieve with the building blocks.
Throwing
This activity is great for those children who like to throw. This can be suited for different age groups.
The target has numbers on each section so you can even add up those scores once the bean bags have been thrown. Add paper and pens to this and children will enjoy writing down their scores and adding them up.
The hoops target is a challenging activity the further away you are. Encourage the children the start close then take a step back each time they manage to get the hoop on.
Ball Pit
This activity has been a favourite for all ages.
The babies are supported by the balls when learning to sit, as well as gaining control over picking up the balls and banging them together. I added some musical instruments into the ball pit to add extra noise.
The older children have particularly enjoyed running up to the ball pit and jumping in. then counting how many balls they have knocked out of the pit as they put them back in ready for the next child’d turn. This encouraged taking turns, counting, and cleaning up after themselves.
Gardening
Children always want to be helpful. Pulling out the weeds supports children’s physical development as well as their understanding of the world. This is a great way to encourage children to help with maintaining the garden.
Watering the plants is something all children love to do. This activity teaches children how to flowers grow and what is needed. this activity is a great way to enjoy water play, learning how to pour and fill up the watering can.
Sand play
Sand play is a something all ages will enjoy. Adding different objects and allow children to explore and experiment. This is great for their imaginations and creativity.
With this particular activity the children enjoyed watching the sand fall through the funnels back into the sand box. They then went on to use the trucks to transport the sand over the the water area driving them along the grass and patio.
Maths Area
This maths area encourages the children to look at colours, shapes and numbers and count. In this area we have jugs, funnels, coloured balls, Pine-cones, sticks, abacus.
The large abacus is used in a variety of ways including encouraging children to add up scores from other garden games such as the throwing target.
During the hot weather we add some shade by attaching sheets the fence and shed to make a den so children can enjoy this while in the shade.
Chalk
This number line was used for a number of activities such as recognising numbers, counting objects.
One of the favourite games we played using this was with the bat and ball. Someone would be stood on number 1 with the ball and the person with the bat on number 2. We would throw the ball and if they hit it with the bat they moved up to number 3 and continued until they missed the ball.
Mark Making
We used this large cardboard box to create an enclosed space in the shade then added some pencils and shapes to this area. This is a fun way to bring Mark making outside.
We used the shapes to draw around and create our own pictures out of shapes. We also drew our own pictures of things we could see in the garden.
Using these shapes allowed us to look through them and see how they change the colour of things we look at. We even added 2 coloured shapes together to make a new colour.
This activity was entirely led by the children. We set out the chalks and and drew some pictures and letters. The children then started colouring in one spot. A short while later the children found out they could make hand prints using the circle of chalk.
After they made some hand prints they then moved on to make foot prints.