“Young children love to dig in the dirt, pick flowers, and pull up plants to see how they grow. They have a fascination with bugs, beetles and worms,” says Extension program coordinator Dot Perkins.

“The Growing a Green Generation children’s gardening curriculum takes advantage of that fascination, using a gardening environment to teach basic skills and foster a love of nature.”

For three years, Perkins has helped develop, evaluate and refine the gardening curriculum, a project begun in 2000 as a collaboration between the UNH department of plant biology and the Child Study and Development Center.

Growing a Green Generation offers parents and teachers a storehouse of information and child-tested activities that introduce children to basic botany, soil science and a full sequence of gardening tasks, from measuring the garden area, to planting, weeding, watering, fertilizing, mulching and harvesting. It offers instructions for creating eight different theme gardens, numerous garden-related arts and crafts activities, garden-related experiments, snacks, songs, games and trips, as well as useful tables and references for teachers.

“We’ve designed the activities to engage all the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch,” says Perkins, “We’ve included sections on container gardening for situations in which children don’t have access to a plot of land,” says Perkins. “The projects use recycled and inexpensive, commonly-available materials. Yes, you can buy a $30 root view—that’s a device with a window that lets you look at what’s going on with the plant below the soil surface—but a recycled soda bottle works just as well.”

“Our main goal for the project was to create a curriculum that would allow pre-school and kindergarten teachers, day care providers, and parents who’ve never planted a seed to have a successful experience with young children in the garden,” says Perkins. The project receives financial support from the Anna and Raymond Tuttle Environmental Horticulture Fund.

Colorful icons accompanying each activity page provide a quick visual overview of the skills the activity helps develop and the plant knowledge children will gain from it. Each activity page tells how much time the activity will take, then moves on to list the learning objectives, materials needed, set-up instructions, sequence of actions, questions teachers can ask to stimulate children’s thinking about the activity, and a glossary of new terms the activity presents.

Teachers and children the CSDC and New Hampshire Technical Institute’s Child and Family Development Center have tried and tested all the activities; the curriculum appends a section of comments Perkins collected during the project’s evaluation phase.

“The curriculum will continue to grow and evolve as we try new things and get feedback from teachers and others who use it,” she says. “Please get out into the garden this summer, try out some of our activities, and help grow the next green generation. We’d like to hear from you!”

March 19: Growing a Green Generation

A conference on learning with young children through the joy of gardening