in the garden – want some fun enrichment activities for kids?
Looking for some hands on activities or projects for your child? We’ve found our favorites. There are nature guides, Haiku worksheets, cooking and gardening videos from nature organizations we love. Keep scrolling to check them out.
Descanso Gardens
Make a Reservation! If you are in the Los Angeles area, make a reservation for the beautiful Descanso Gardens. A wonderful place to get away, just a 20 minute drive from downtown. Self-guided field trips are available from September 1, 2021 – June 3rd, 2022. You can download a student activity booklet HERE.
You can also go directly to their website and learn about Habitats, Adaptations and Interactions, Nature Guides, and the Descanso Partnership Programs.
If you can’t make it to the gardens, explore them virtually. Descanso has so much to offer. We’ve loved these gardens and have explored them since my children were infants and to this day, we still learn new and exciting bits of treasured information. You can explore the Habitat of the Oak Trees HERE, or Compare and Contrast habitats and which animals call the gardens home HERE.
LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes
As we mentioned in the Gardening Enrichment Classes post, there are numerous gardening and outdoor activities offered by LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles through their “En Familia con LA Plaza y 123 Andrés” program (https://lapca.org/en-familia-con-la-plaza/).
Each session emphasizes creativity, fun and family time. All activities are available online as well as downloadable activity guides for each session!
Our Favorite Activities include: “Culinary Arts: Mango Peach Ice Cream,” “Edible Teaching Garden: Soil Painting” and “Edible Teaching Garden: Poblano Pepper Planting”
Expanding Your Horizons – Cornell University
Have you ever wondered, what is a Botanist, anyway? Check out this video from Adriana Hernandez, a Plant Evolutionary Biology PhD student at Cornell. This video not only covers what a Botanist is, but what herbarium is and how to collect specimens in the garden.
It’s Part 4 in the series “Adventures through the Plant Kingdom” Just a quick sidenote: We wanted to mention this because, how cool is it that they have this program! The EYH is a program specifically geared towards girls. As mentioned on their website: “Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) is a one-day conference designed to stimulate participants’ interest in math and science through hands-on activities, provide female scientist role models, and foster awareness of opportunities in math and science-related careers.”
Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego
From the website: “The mission of the Japanese Friendship Garden Society of San Diego (JFG) is to develop a traditional Japanese garden as a center to educate, engage, and inspire people of diverse backgrounds about Japanese culture and community legacy.”
If you can’t visit in person, you can find wonderful activity worksheets and lesson plans on their website. Our favorite activity worksheet is HAIKU, which are a form of Japanese poetry that uses a particular pattern and usually conveys a special feeling or highlights a particular season. You can find it HERE. They also offer school outreach and docent tours as well.
The Arboretum – Los Angeles Arboretum & Botanic Garden, CA
We mentioned this in our enrichment classes posting and we had to bring it back here. We can’t express enough how many hours of activities are at your fingertips. Check out their “AT HOME NATURE ADVENTURES” HERE.
You have to see the list of activities for yourself, I wouldn’t be surprised if you marked this page as a favorite on your toolbar. They have activities that range from “Discovering the aerodynamics of seed dispersal” in their Helicopter Seed activity to “Painting an autumn tree while learning about Photosynthesis” in their Broccoli – Brushed Autumn Art lesson. There’s more, when you are done with exploring activities, head over to the Digital Arboretum and go Virtual or browse the library from home. Check out the Digital Arboretum HERE.
