Project: Plan and Plant a Garden

This is a family project to help children learn about responsibility and patience through planning, planting, and monitoring a garden.

Among one of the most rewarding tasks is planting a garden. Whether it is a veggie garden, flower garden, water garden, or rock garden, planting seeds and seeing them through to fruition is a wondrous thing. This is a great way to teach about responsibility and patience.

Using the learning and activity sheets in this packet you can help your learner choose, plan, plant, and chart the progress of a garden of their choice. Use any basic gardening book from your shelf or local library to complete the activities. We have also included some great kid friendly internet resource links on our website to help you bring this project to life. You will find them on the same page that you downloaded this project.

Project Overview Steps

Step 1: Print out the Plan and Plant a Garden resource packet below to begin your unit project.

Our Plan and Plant a Garden 28 page resource packet is designed to be printed out and then bound on the left with a three-hole duo-tang, binder, comb spine, or hand sewn. Instructions are included in the resource. Some pages are templates and can be printed as many times as needed while others are activity specific sheets. Almost all of our pages are in color. If ink is an issue, you can print out our resources in grey scale.


Step 2: Begin going through the resource packet systematically with your children. Resource focus areas include:
Learn about plants and their needs. Review the needs of plants using the included sheets. Visit any of the gardening sites listed on our site to help children learn about these details.

Learn about the Steps to Good Gardening. Using the online resource links or resources of your own, fill out the steps to good gardening practices on the sheet provided. Hints are also given on the page itself.

Learn about different types of gardens. There are many distinct types of gardens. Use these sheets to help you learn about some unique types of gardens that people can grow. Whether you live in the city with only sidewalk, out in the country with acres to roam, or just have a small backyard in a neighborhood, there is always a garden waiting to be planted.


Step 3: Select the type of garden you would like to plant and plan a garden to suit your needs. Resource focus areas include:
Decide - What Kind of Garden Shall I Grow? After you investigate the different types of gardens available, use the graphic organizer to help your child determine the best kind of garden to plant in your particular home or designated area.

Decide - What Are You Going to Plant in Your Garden? Use this page to help children decide what kinds of plants they would like to plant. Do this page before you do the plant detective worksheets or in conjunction with their completion. The purpose of this page is to provide a record of what is desired in their garden with their own art work to illustrate their wishes. If you have a child who does NOT like art, pictures could be printed off the internet or cut out from old garden magazines and pasted on instead.

Be a Plant Fact Detective. Print out one sheet for each plant that will be placed in your garden or for any plant that your child may be interested in learning about. Information can be gathered using the back of garden seed packets, info sheets available from most all garden centres, books from the library or from the internet.

Draw a Map of Your Garden. This page will help your child map out their growing space. There is also the opportunity for children to create a map key and practice directional activities. Perhaps you may want to help your child develop the map based on a particular time of the day as an alternative activity.


Step 4: Prepare your growing area and plant your garden.
Learn about Good Gardening Tools. How many gardening tools do you recognize from these pages? With just some quick searches online or a visit to your local hardware or garden supply centre you can find out what each tool is used for.
Create plant labels for your garden. Using our templates create and stake garden labels in your planting area. This activity gives budding artists another opportunity to draw about the beauty of nature. Refer to the links below to help find pictures of your selected plant(s). The pre-printed selections are the plants in our own family garden here in BC, Canada.


Step 5: Track the progress of your garden. Resource focus areas include:

Track the Growth of Your Garden. This is a wonderful way to have children practice patience and also measuring with a ruler at the same time. As a side note, this can be an opportunity for young mathematicians to practice graphing in another activity, if you so choose, by using just some simple graphing paper and different colored pencils.

Note - How Big Did it Grow? Track the progress of a favorite plant with art. You could also print this page out to do multiple plants if your child has more than one "favorite" plant that they want to track. Have a really young learner? This is a way that Pre/K+ can choose and track the progress of only one plant using their drawing skills.

Make Memories using the Photo Keepsake Pages. Don't forget to take lots of pictures with your little gardeners in their element. Great to show proof of learning for SLPs (student learning plans) and show friends and family too!!




Flower Delivery - We were alerted to this website by the teacher of a student at Monument Charter School. The Teacher emailed us to thank us for our page and let us know it was such a help to her class. She also told us that one her students found this resource page and, as a result, was given an award of Student of The Week by Mrs Hughes. Great Job!!!!!

Kids' Valley Garden - This is a wonderful site out of Canada for children to explore on their own. Created by award winning people who really like horticulture and kids. Really cool for kids.

The Plant Life Cycle - This is a really neat resource for children to view all of the parts of the plant lifecycle in a neat interactive way. The available lessons can be viewed using the interactive format or in a whiteboard format as well.

My First Garden - This is a really great site with lessons to do, to read and such. Designed for 4th grade it provides lots of neat things for kids to explore on their own. They have a neat little encyclopedia of flowers and veggies as well. They talk about gardening in odd places as well. Sooo cool for kids!

The Kids Garden - This is a great reference site our of the UK for info on gardening and planting with children. Many different areas are covered including plant propagation with children, attracting butterflies and birds to your garden, pond life info and more. There is even an "Ask the Expert" section as well. Not a lot of downloads but tons of great info. An added plus is its clean design and well organized pages.

I Can Garden - This Canadian site has quite a bit of info on it for avid gardeners. They have a special "Kidz Corner" with lots of good articles and ideas for young gardeners.

Online School of Plants - If you are looking for a lot of good info, presented well and engaging for a bit older learner who want to delve deeper into learning about plants, then this is the site for you to visit. This page is also a great parent resource site as it teaches and provides more info than the average 5th grader may need. Note: This page does provide links to other sites on the web in their content.

How Stuff Works - Types of Gardens - Good reference for the types of garden sheet above.