garden – Mrs Mama Bird

Gardens are a perfect spring theme for preschool! In this post you will find some creative garden themed activities to get your preschoolers engaged and learning. Some of these activities include, companion activities for My Garden, by Kevin Henkes, garden alphabet games, a flower syllable game (FREE), garden number games, garden visual discrimination activities, garden sensory bin ideas, and a garden craft template (FREE).

There are so many fun children’s books to choose from when planning a garden them for preschool. My Garden, by Kevin Henkes is one of my favorite stories to use when exploring gardens and spring time because it harnesses the imagination of a child who is gardening alongside her mother.

In the story, My Garden, a child imagines the changes she would make to her mother’s garden if it could do fantastic things. For example, if she picked a flower from her garden, another would grow right back in it’s place. She imagines that the strawberries light up at night and the garden can also grow useful things like umbrellas and buttons.

The story sets the stage for preschoolers to make connections to the story and imagine their own magical gardens. I created a response activity that asks them to do exactly that- create their own gardens. The activity provides pictures from the story for students to cut and paste onto a garden background to represent what they would want their garden to look like. There are also blank squares to add their own ideas if they choose. Once students are finished arranging their gardens, they can attach the writing prompt to add a description of their garden. The writing prompt reads, “If I had a garden…”

There is also the option to cut and glue the grass and the fence onto a sheet of brown construction paper to give students more room to work. If you’re in a hurry, substitute the grass image with green construction paper that students can cut to look like grass. This activity and much more can be found in the My Garden Book Companion at the bottom of this post.

Cover up games are my absolute favorite way to practice letter and number recognition. I am excited to share these adorable garden themed cover up games for both alphabet and numbers.

I created 3 sets of literacy cards for the Garden Alphabet Cover Up games: uppercase letters, lowercase letters and beginning sound pictures.

These letter cards can be placed in a sensory bin or presented in a draw pile. I chose to use pinto beans in the sensory bin because they are brown like dirt, but a bit of rice dyed green would be really fun too!

There are 3 Literacy Cover Up Mats to choose from: uppercase letters, lowercase letters and beginning sound pictures. You can decide how you want your students to match the letters or sounds, depending on their readiness level. Preschoolers are able to match uppercase to uppercase, lowercase to lowercase, lowercase to uppercase, uppercase to lowercase, uppercase to beginning sound, lowercase to beginning sound, and beginning sound to beginning sound. When a card is pulled from the bin or pile, students can cover it’s match on the cover up mat with a dry erase marker or a counter.

If you don’t have the time (or let’s face it, the patience) to cut out all the letter cards, don’t! These cover up mats also work perfectly with 1 inch letter tiles or alphabet erasers. You can hide them in the sensory bin or inside some fun containers. I used carrot Easter eggs from Michael’s and 1 inch letter tiles in the picture. Simply have your students find the letter and place it on top of it’s match on the mat.

Of course I couldn’t take the time to make all these fun cover up mats without including numbers too. With this resource, a set of number cards 1 – 20 is also included.

You can decide if you want to practice numbers 1 – 10 or 1 – 20 and set up your Cover Up Mat accordingly.

You can play the Cover Up game the same was as the letter version, with the number cards in the sensory bin, covering up the mat as you find each number. Or you can put counters in small containers to dump and count. Then cover up the quantity of the items found. I filled the same Easter egg carrots with carrot erasers to represent each number 1 – 10.

For those of you who prefer to use the cover up mat a single time, there are black and white versions of all five mats! These are great with crayons, markers, and dot markers. Then students can keep their work!

For the preschoolers who have mastered identifying letter names, both upper and lowercase, I love activities that bring together letter name and letter sound identification. I created a garden themed alphabet game to enhance letter recognition and letter sound recognition in the same game.

The biggest cards in this game are the watering can beginning sound cards. They are the anchor cards. Choose which letters you want to practice (I like to stick with 12 or less at a time) and lay the watering cans out on the surface in front of you.

The matching cards include the Seed Packet Uppercase Letter Cards, the Spade Lowercase Letter Cards and the Flower Pot Beginning Sound Picture Cards. Again, take out the cards that correspond with the letters you want your preschoolers to practice. These cards are the same size so they can be shuffled together and placed face down in a draw pile.

Have your preschoolers take turns drawing a card and placing it on the correct watering can. The object of the game is to work together to build all the matches. Each watering can has an uppercase letter, lowercase letter and beginning sound picture that will correspond with it.

At the end of the game, your preschoolers can show what they know with these garden themed letter and sound match printables. You can find the link for all the Garden Letter and Sound Match materials at the bottom of this post.

Another fun garden themed activity is the Build a Flower Syllable Sort, which is FREE in my TpT Shop. Practicing syllables is an excellent way for your preschooler to build phonemic awareness and prepare them for kindergarten.

This activity includes 15 spring picture flower petals and 3 flower stems. Each flower stems represents a number of syllables in the word: one, two, or three. Preschoolers can take turns picking a flower petal and placing it on the correct flower stem based on the number of syllables in the picture.

Preschoolers can work together to build all three flowers then practice counting syllables on their own with the printable syllable counting worksheet. You can find the link to this FREEBIE at the bottom of this post.

Sensory bins are an absolute FAVORITE in my house, so I can’t start a new theme of stories and activities without switching out the items in our sensory bins. Truth be told, I actually really enjoy curating little items to put inside these bins for my kids to explore. Since I’ve been making these for several years, I store and reuse all my fillers.

This garden sensory bin features a mini gardening tool kit that I spotted a the Target dollar spot, faux flowers from dollar tree, and a small decorative bird and nest from Michaels. My daughter loved filling the flower pot with pinto beans and placing the flowers in it. I will definitely add more flower pots next time I put this bin together.

Another oldie-but-goodie preschool activity is always play doh trays. When you mix play doh, play doh tools, and several loose parts items together, it gives preschoolers such a strong invitation to create. Don’t you love the yellow tulip with pink leaves?? Have all your preschoolers work together to build a whole garden!

Finally, no preschool theme is complete without a good craft to top it off. I created a FREE watering can template for you to design a flower bouquet inside of. The preschool activity is very open ended- you can decide the medium for the watering can, stem, flower petals and leaves based on whatever you have on hand. I decided to color the watering can with my daughter in crayons, then cut it out and glue it to a new piece of paper. Then we used markers to draw flower stems and added flower centers and petals with our fingerprints and tempera paint. At the end, we drew leaves on the stems with markers again. I love this craft because it can be trimmed to fit an 8 x 10 frame or the watering can can be cut out and glued to an 8 x 10 canvas, making a perfect gift! If you’re interested in downloading this activity, you can find the link below.

I hope this post provided you with some inspiration as you plan some fun garden and spring activities for your preschoolers. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed creating these engaging resources for you through the help of my curious preschooler, Lillian.

Below you can find the links to all the activities mentioned throughout the post and more.