In my classroom, we are lucky enough to have a play house tall enough for my students to stand up in. At the beginning of most of our units, I change the play house into a new dramatic play themed area. This time, we were learning about growing things and where our food comes from, so a garden center seemed like the perfect way for my students to experience what planting was really like!
To start the transformation, I decorated the outside of our garden center with the Boxwood Garland. I used two 6-foot lengths. One length I laid on the roof and the second I attached with self-adhesive hooks in a draped fashion across the front roof line. I also used chalk to decorate the front facade with the words "Garden Center" and some more decorative vines and flowers.
Next, I decorated the inside of the garden center with different tools that I knew my students would enjoy using to "plant" their plants. I bought some child-sized gardening gloves and tools, as well as some seed packets that corresponded to the plants we could plant. I also added some Carrot Plastic Easter Eggs and several OvalGalvanized Buckets to store our seeds and tools in. The DIY Child's Aprons were the perfect addition for my little gardeners to wear as they planted their seeds and plants.
I knew I wanted to give my students an authentic planting experience, but I also knew we didn't need the mess of potting soil. Soil colored pebbles were the perfect alternative! We used the super durable Berry Baskets to store the pebbles that we used for soil. We also used the DIY Flowerpots as the vessels we planted our faux plants in. We discovered later on that if we took the paper liners out of the DIY Flowerpots we could see the "roots" of our plants under the "soil".
Then, the fun began! My students were able to experience how to plant plants and care of them! They used the DIY Flowerpots, filled them up with some "soil" and planted!
The Carrot-Shaped Plastic Easter Eggs are a huge hit because my students discovered they can be completely covered up inside the pot. They like to plant them, give them some water and light, then pull them out of the soil completely grown! My students were creative in their use of the Berry Baskets! They planted some plants in them as well. One student told me that it reminded them of the black plastic planters that real plants come in!
You can see that my students were very creative in how they chose to plant these plants! They are enjoying this experience along with the actual planting of seeds and have a great understanding of everything a plant needs to grow and thrive!
