Gardening Lab for Kids

Gardening Lab for Kids
Gifted by Quarto Publishing Group USA
www.quartous.com
Reviewed by Molly Fletcher, Editor, AllFreeKidsCrafts.com

Another delightful offering in Quarry Books' Hands-On Family series, Gardening Lab for Kids is a collection of 52 kid-friendly activities that teach children how to plant, cultivate, and harvest a garden. Aside from the basics of biology and botany, children will gain an appreciation for the environment and learn lessons in responsibility and patience. The projects in this guide to a green thumb are divided into six units, each of which contains 10 projects. I've listed my two favorite labs from each unit in parentheses, but this book is never short on inspiration:

• Garden Basics (Plant Parts, Watering)
• Getting Started (Seeds, Soil Percolation)
• Theme Gardening (Butterfly Garden, Mini Pizza Garden)
• Green Gardening (Toad Abode, Make a Desert Terrarium)
• Garden Art (Wind Chimes, Soup Can Luminaries)
• Enjoying Your Garden (Garden Poetry, Sleepy Herb Sachets)

As your family works through this book, kids will pick up important skills like observation, map reading, planting and harvesting, and composting. Adults who supervise the outdoor play may learn a thing or two as well! Ecology, insects, cooking–this book makes all of these topics and more easy to understand. Better still, Gardening Lab for Kids favors a hands-on approach which keeps kids engaged. Each activity can be repeated as many times as you want. The results will be different every time.

Author Renata Fossen Brown, the Vice President of Education at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, holds a B.A. in biology and an M.A. in curriculum and instruction. In short, she knows how to get children excited to learn. With her help, you can reinforce lessons learned in the classroom in your own back yard. With the activities in Gardening Lab for Kids, children gain experiential knowledge that will help them excel in school.

Gardening Lab for Kids is a valuable resource for parents and teachers. Full of ideas that are educational and entertaining, this book makes discovery fun. Supply budgets are dwindling in schools, but the activities in this collection call for materials that are inexpensive and easy to find. Every project has a brief introduction to explain its relevance as well as a materials list and a "Dig Deeper" section with additional facts and suggestions for further research.  

Cut back on the screen time and encourage your kids to play outdoors with the projects in Gardening Lab for Kids. This book is chock full of brilliant activities and projects for sunny days, stormy nights, and everything in between. Learn lessons and make memories at the same time with this wonderful guide.

BONUS! Enter to win a copy of Gardening Lab for Kids here. Contest ends 5/31/15.