A fairy garden has always been on my to do list so when the beautiful spring weather arrived we went planning our garden design, Tara quickly assured me it would be a smurf village not a fairy garden so i followed her lead and she helped me create a one of a kind smurf village. We used a saucer from under a pot plant and rested it on a stump. Make sure the saucer has a draining hole and fill up with soil. We added some ground cover greenery that will hopefully spread and can be cut back with scissors by your little gardener. To create a bridge we used twine to connect some twigs together to form a plank then placed it over some blue gems. Our toadstools are corks painted white/red with puffy paint white spots.
We found a bird nest hut from Bunnings and some coloured bonsai pebbles to add to the village. Tara remembers to water the village every day with a spray bottle i leave next to the garden. Lovely to see her enjoy hours of outside imaginative play together with the Smurfs.
We are always looking for ways to use up our egg cartons! Seems we have collected more since having chickens of our own as everyone passes them on for us to use so while the chickens are having a break from laying during the winter we decided to use our cartons for a treasure hunt!I googled some images of things i knew we had around our yard that Tara could collect. Glued the 12 pictures onto the egg carton and presented it to Tara
She loved it, and set about on her journey to search for her 12 items. This could also be done for a younger child with just a half dozen egg carton as i does take a while to collect all 12 items and all the hard concentrating to work out where they would be.
Grass was the easiest to check off the list first
But eventually she found them all, a shell, feather, stick, bottlebrush, wattle, snail, leaf, spring onion, rock, rose petal, and mint. Talking about where a snail may be hiding or where she has seen wattle growing made for some great memory and problem solving skills.
With spring here we have made the most of it by getting into the sunshine. We decided to this year add a herb garden to our vegetable patch so i labeled the pots and Tara matched the packet of herbs to their pots. Great for letter and word recognition.
Its amazing how the outdoors can bring out so many more learning opportunities and the simple things like filling up pots can turn into lessons about "empty" "half" and "full"
We found a bird nest hut from Bunnings and some coloured bonsai pebbles to add to the village. Tara remembers to water the village every day with a spray bottle i leave next to the garden. Lovely to see her enjoy hours of outside imaginative play together with the Smurfs.
She loved it, and set about on her journey to search for her 12 items. This could also be done for a younger child with just a half dozen egg carton as i does take a while to collect all 12 items and all the hard concentrating to work out where they would be.
Its amazing how the outdoors can bring out so many more learning opportunities and the simple things like filling up pots can turn into lessons about "empty" "half" and "full"
