Fun Ways to Homeschool in the Garden

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The garden is a great place to homeschool your children over the summer. It’s a great place to explore and learn about the world around you and work through basic earth science requirements for your child’s lessons. These fun tips for homeschooling in the garden are just a starting point for the many wonderful things your child can learn by rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands in the dirt.

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For more summer homeschool ideas check out these tips for homeschooling on your next camping trip.

Why Homeschool in the Garden

There are so many things to study and learn about in the garden. Not only can you incorporate lots of science lessons in the garden, you can also take your ELA, math, history, and art studies to the garden as well.

Getting outside, having a change of scenery, and working on all aspects of planning and planting a garden are excellent ways to enrich your homeschool. Not only are there many lessons to be learned about plants, pollination, and insects, but your homeschoolers will learn the importance of patience, perseverance, and responsibility.

Ways to Homeschool in the Garden

Keep a Garden Journal

Garden journals are a great way to teach your child to observe. They can then create a catalog of what they have observed as they watch plants grow.

You can have your child draw each part of the plant in detail in their garden journal, along with notes regarding the growing process. They can track how the weather affects the plants in the garden from heat to the amount of rain.

What wildlife do they see in the garden? How do these creatures affect the garden?

You can grab a garden journal like the one from The Homeschool Garden or create your own garden journal.

Explore Insects

Grab an insect-catching kit and see what insects you can find and identify in your garden. Discuss how each of these insects can help in the garden or harm it.

This is a great opportunity to get an up-close look at insects for drawing them in their garden or nature journals to keep and look back on for years to come. Take the time to build your own bug house for a great way to invite beneficial insects to your garden.

You can also order insect kits, such as butterfly kits, praying mantis kits, or ladybug kits to observe and release into your garden. Spend time studying the specific insect and learning about how it affects the plants in its environment. Seed or plant-specific plants for that insect in your garden to provide the perfect habitat.

Study the Birds

The garden is a great place to learn about birds through bird watching. Birdwatching is one of our family’s favorite activities. You can learn so much by watching the local birds that visit your garden.

Add a birdbath, bird feeders, and even birdhouses a bit away from your garden to help attract these birds to your garden to help with pests while helping to keep them from choosing your vegetables for a snack.

Drawing Birds in the Garden for Homeschool

Hummingbirds are amazing birds to attract to your garden with flowers and a hummingbird feeder. These small birds will help your garden by eating small insects as a protein source.

Learn How Plants Grow

One of the most obvious and important lessons your child learns in the garden is how plants grow. This gives your child an up close and personal look at how food gets from seed to table and how different that journey can be from one plant to the next. Use your garden as an opportunity for your child to learn to oversee and find the small changes that happen every day as the plants grow.

One of the best ways to see how things break rot and break down up close and personal is through composting. Your garden will benefit greatly from adding compost, as it provides vital nutrients to your plants. It is also very easy to make at home and an opportunity to show your kids how decomposition works.

Make a large tote top compost or purchase a compost tumbler to make this project easier. You can have your child keep a garden journal where they can record their composting efforts. Keep track of what goes into your compost with each addition and what can be observed in the compost with each turn.

Work on Problem-Solving Skills

When something goes wrong in the garden or a new plant you do not recognize appears in the garden you can challenge your kids to work on their problem-solving skills to figure it out and find the right solution.

This is a great way to give older kids a chance to learn how to use Google for finding out what something is. Use Google and your gardening books to help find the right solutions to your garden problems. The more your child gets to work on their problem-solving skills the better.

Learn Responsibility

The garden is a great place to learn to be responsible.

When you forget to give a pet it’s food and water the consequences can cost a living creature their lives. However, the worst that can happen to a forgotten garden is the weeds overgrown and your vegetables die off. This is a much more humane lesson on being responsible and caring for others than a pet.

Build a Weather Station

Making your own weather station in the garden is a great way to learn more about the weather and how it affects your plants. Use your weather station to track the weather in your child’s garden journal, along with their observations about how the plants react to things like rain and heat.

Observe the actual weather in your garden. Then discuss with your child how this weather is alike and different from the weather that was predicted by the professionals. You can use this weather station to help teach your kids how the weather is tracked and predicted.

Learn About Acids and Bases

You can use this experiment to teach your child about acids and bases in a full real-life way by testing the PH levels of your soil. Tests can be a great way to determine whether you need to add amendments to your soil to help your garden grow.

You can do this easily by mixing a few soil samples with a small amount of water. Then using baking soda and vinegar in separate samples to see how they react with your soil samples. Soil that is acidic is more likely to react with baking soda. The more basic the soil, the more it will react with vinegar. You can also purchase PH soil test kits to help find the PH level in a less dramatic way for families worried about the mess of a group project.

Learn How to Clean Water

As well as being a valuable emergency skill, knowing how to filter water also provides a wonderful opportunity to teach children about pollution and how to clean up the mess we have made. Younger children can learn how to build water filters from kits that come with instructions.

Have older kids perform some research on water filters and create their own using items lying around the house. After that, mix some dirt from the garden into a jug of water. Then practice filtering the water until you’re able to get clean water.