Kid's Garden Journals

As I mentioned in my garden planning post, the children each have and care for their own garden squares.  Every year they look through my seed catalogs and decide what they want to plant in their gardens.  Last year Little Man wanted to plant a pumpkin and we followed the book Kid's Pumpkin Projects: Planting and Harvest Fun.  One of the projects was starting a pumpkin journal and because he and Big Man were the only ones doing pumpkins we just made a  journal for everyone and called them garden journals.  These were so fun, the children drew their garden plans, taped the seeds of what they were planting in them, drew pictures as their plants grew, and Big Woman even wrote the cutest poem in hers. 

Other ideas for journal entries were keeping track of the weather, writing a short story about your plants, taking pictures of your garden and then glue them in, include pressed leaves and buds, chart the growth of your plants, and when you have harvested your plant, include what you made with it or how you ate it.  These are personal and can include artwork, thoughts, predictions, observations and feelings.  

To make the journals you could purchase a bound art book from the craft store and cover them with printed paper. Or for a frugal version like we did, just take a stack of printer paper and two pieces of printed scrapbook paper for the front and the back and staple them together.  I also glued a strip of paper running along the stapled side so the kids wouldn't get poked by the staples.  They made labels for the cover and decorated them with stickers.  Little Woman even wanted to water color her cover so I let her have at it.  She loves to cut and glue so I gave her my old seed catalogs and she cut out what she wanted to plant and glued them on her planning page.

The nature table finally got an actual shelf, rather than the floor, so we put a basket filled with our weather lapbooks, Handbook of Nature study newsletters, seed catalogs, Ranger Rick Jr. magazines and now our garden journals.  When the kiddos want to make an entry they can just grab them out of the basket and create away.  

This week we worked on garden plans for 2014 and Big Woman decided to grow a bunny garden to feed her precious bunny. Big Man always does whatever is the easiest, so pumpkin it was for the 5th year in a row.  Little Man however wanted to plant just about everything in the garden catalog while Little Woman just wants pink flowers.  We are so excited to start another year of gardening fun!

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