MINI MONDAY: ALPHABET GARDEN
How does your garden grow? With bright flowers, veggie powers, and little letters all in a row! Design your own beautiful outdoor garden and practice your watering skills as you don your acting cap and play with words!
Materials
- Chalk
- Watering Can
Directions:
- Head outside and design your garden with your little one. Use chalk to draw a variety of flowers, fruits, and vegetables on the sidewalk. Think about different flowers you like seeing, or the different foods you like to eat as you choose what to “plant”!
- Inside each of your plants, write a different letter of the alphabet. Ask your child to choose which letters they’d like to include! Depending on the age of your child, allow them to write the letters, or write them together.
- What do plants need to grow? Water! Once you’ve finished your garden, it’s time to give it some tender loving care. Fill the watering can with water and give it to your little one. Ask them to water each of the plants in your garden one at a time! What happens when you tilt the can over?
- Challenge your little one to find and water a specific letter, or allow them to choose which letter they want to water on their own!
- If you don’t have a watering can that’s small enough for your little one, you can also fill a small plastic cup with water
- As they water each letter, ask them what sound it makes. Encourage them to make the sound with you, and together, think of a word that starts with that letter. Add some drama to your day as you invent actions and act out each word together!
- Continue until you’ve watered all the plants in your garden!
Keep the fun and learning going! Can you…
- Plant a garden that’s big enough to contain all the letters of the alphabet?
- Spell your name? Include all the letters in your name in your garden, and water them in order! Can you do the same with your friends’ names?
- Practice with numbers instead of letters? Every time you water a different number, do that amount of jumping jacks!
Essential Learning Experiences
Engaging in Sound and Word Play
There are many different ways for children to share what they know! As their literacy skills develop, your little one can show what they know and understand through speech, singing, storytelling, drawing, gestures, and dramatic play. This week’s activity allows children to share their understanding of a variety of words by creating actions to represent them.
Cause and Effect
Cause and effect refers to the relationship between an action and its outcome – for example, “when I step in the puddle, my foot gets wet!” Children can learn to understand and anticipate cause and effect reactions to a variety of actions.
This week’s activity helps to support the understanding of cause and effect reactions by encouraging children to realize that because the watering can is full of water, water pours out when they tip it over. Further cause and effect reactions can be explored by discussing how watering plants helps give them what they need to grow, or how pouring the water over the sidewalk chalk causes it to wash away.
Stay tuned for more resources to help spark kids’ creative learning!
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