One of the best ways to educate your kids about nature, wildlife, and living independently is gardening. No matter the size of your garden, there are ways to change it into kids' educational playgrounds.
If you need some creative ideas for a child-friendly garden, here are what we have:
Create A Craft Station
If your kids love drawing, why not set up a small craft station in the backyard where they can observe the garden, breathe some fresh air, and create their artwork.
This is also a good outdoor home activity to pull your children off smartphones, tablets, and other electronic devices. Meanwhile, the setup is pretty easy. You just need a set of chairs and a table, an outdoor chalkboard.
To add fun, you can set some small, easy missions for them, along with attractive prizes, such as their favorite snacks or a medal.
Set Up A Spot For Kids To Chill Out In The Garden
Consider creating a raised decking area for your kids if you find them to love somewhere to lounge around.
Rather than patio paving, raised decking space is kid-friendlier because it’s less slippery and more comfortable for bare feet.
Provide as much as shade to this space by growing vines, assembling an awning, or investing on a patio umbrella. Don’t forget about the chairs and a table.
Create A Pond
Exactly, we highly recommend parents create a kid-sized pond in the garden.
A large bucket is everything you need; make sure it has no drainage hole. Fill the bucket with fresh water, then add some pebbles, soils, and a few big stones at the bottom.
Depending on the free room you have in the garden, create different levels by using different sizes of rocks.
To make it look more like-real, add some young water plants onto this pond, such as Starwort, flowering rush, and miniature waterlily.
Let kids give you a hand during the pond-building process, they will appreciate their hard work after it is finished and visit it every day. Make it more fun by adding a slope or a wood log for any wild animals to easily get out of it.
Through this pond, parents can educate their kids more about nature, the plants and animals’ life. By observing their mini-world, kids will get some specific lessons on their own, too.
Create A Fairy Garden
Kids always believe in fairies.
From that point, why not turn your garden into a fairy garden by adding some fairy houses. Imagine how excited they are in choosing the materials and colors for the house.
After finding a good spot in your garden to place the fairy house, build a walkway, fence, and a mini garden.
Grow Kid-Friendly Plants
To encourage your kids to love gardening, parents should stick to these three elements when creating a new garden:
Safety
Make sure that the plant that you’re going to grow doesn’t contain toxins. The poisoning parts are varied between species and the symptoms are also specific. For example:
Plant Name | Symptom/poisonous parts |
Asthma weed or sticky weed | Skin allergies |
Rhubarb | All parts are poisonous (except the stems) |
Grevilleas | Rashes, redness, and itching |
Cycads | Their branches if eaten fresh might be poisonous |
Lantana | Green berries cause muscle weakness, jaundice, and stomach pains if eaten |
Euphorbia genus | Their sap causes injuries or pains to the eyes |
Dumb cane | Cause swelling if eaten |
Daphne | Poisonous berries |
Belladonna lily | Contain toxic bulbs and sap |
Arum lily | All parts are toxin, which causes pain and irritation in the mouth if eaten |
Angel's trumpet | Contain poisonous nectar, seeds, and flowers |
Also, avoid growing chilies because their attractive fruits might encourage kids to eat or pluck to play, which might be uncomfortable, even painful in the mouth. Not to say that kids might accidentally rub their eyes while playing with them.
Succulents and cacti are the next no-no due to their sharp spikes.
The plants that we highly recommend kids to grow are fruits and vegetables. If they want some flowers, consider whether that species is safe to grow or not.
Easy To Grow
Most kids are impatient.
They will feel bored and disappointed if the plants they grew don’t grow or even die. To get them to enjoy gardening, start with easy-to-grow plants.
They should require low maintenance other than feeding and watering, germinate fast, and produce a crop quickly. For example:
- Beans
- Sunflowers
- Potatoes
- Carrots
- Pumpkins
- Cherry tomatoes
- Marigolds
- Radishes
If kids want to grow lawn-side plants, make sure they’re resilient
Kids might play around the lawn, such as running, jumping, and playing football.
So, their lawn-side plants should be tough to withstand being trampled by feet. You can choose choisya, euonymus, elaeagnus, escallonia, and crocosmia.
Extra: Let your kids create their own garden, plan where they’d like them to go, and be responsible for their choices. This is one of the very first steps to teach children to be independent.
Conclusion
You should understand your child’s characteristics to get the right creative ideas for a child-friendly garden.
For extra fun, we’ve got some other ideas for you to consider:
- Create a fire pit for night’s camp out
- Harvest the fruits and veggies that your kids grew and celebrate a small party, picnic, or camping trip in your garden
- Make your garden a home of butterflies and birds
- Add a mud kitchen
- Build a climbing frame
- Set up a camping tent where kids can play around there
- Give your kids their own gardening tools
That’s all for this article. We hope it was helpful for you to change your garden into a favorite place for kids to play around. Thanks for reading!
