I love volunteering at The Big Explorer’s elementary school. My favorite assignment? Getting students outside and into the school garden. So far this year, we’ve taste-tested apples, talked about (and planted) peas from seed, and made garden markers. We’re clearly just getting started.
Thankfully, there are a lot of resources out there to help parents and educators alike to inspire kids in the garden. Wings, Worms, and Wonder is one such resource.
Wings, Worms, and Wonder is a guide for teachers, parents and community gardeners. It features 36 art- and garden-based activities for use with school-age children, complete with child-tested lesson plans featuring background information, materials, procedures, follow up ideas and extension activities for each.
Author Kelly Johnson knows a thing or two about the topic of kids in the garden. She’s a gardener, artist, surfer, musician and seasoned Montessori teacher. And among other accomplishments, Johnson has participated in the development and facilitation of multiple successful school and community gardens.
What’s inside Wings, Worms, and Wonder?
If you’ve got a garden and want to know what to do with it, this book can help.
In the words of Johnson, Wings, Worms, and Wonder “provides the advice and inspiration needed to create meaningful outdoor experiences with elementary children through arts and organic gardening, with dashes of biology, botany and ecology.”
The 180-page guide comes complete with garden lesson plans, color illustrations, anecdotes, even friendly advice. Sections include:
- Getting Started: A brief introduction to school gardens and how to get yours student-ready.
- Nature Journaling: Why a nature journal is important and how to make your own.
- Wings: Information and activities centered on butterflies, bugs and birds.
- Worms: “In the Soil” discusses soil and worms, “On the Soil” plant identification, anatomy and physiology, and “Of the Soil” sprouting and growing activities.
- Wonder: Activities to provide the “hook” that will inspire and excite kids to build a future in environmental education and natural history studies.
I especially love the section on gathering your field materials. Johnson’s must-have list includes things like bug viewers, pencils, rulers, pocket field guides, collection baskets and a nature journal.
Some of the lesson plans are a little beyond my skill base or require materials I don’t have (such as butterfly and moth specimens). But others are spot on – discussing helpful versus harmful garden bugs and learning about local wildflowers, for instance.
Wings, Worms, and Wonder retails for $44.95.
How to use Wings, Worms, and Wonder in your own backyard
As long as you’d like to grow a garden with kids, this book can help. Wings, Worms, and Wonders is packed with a lot of practical information and facts that are useful whether you’re an educator, parent or both.
Although you might not be able to complete all 36 activities as designed, there’s no reason you can’t tailor the tasks to your kids’ interests and abilities.
Win a copy of Wings, Worms, and Wonder!
Here’s the best part! Author Kelly Johnson has kindly agreed to offer a free, signed copy to one lucky reader!
To enter, leave a comment sharing your favorite thing to grow or do with kids in your garden. Good luck!
- This giveaway will run through midnight PST on Wed., March 20, 2013*.
- You must include an email address with your comment. Entries without an email address will not be included. (If you prefer, you can send me your comment by email.)
- This giveaway is open to U.S. residents only.
- The winner will be chosen using the nifty random number generator at random.org.
- Winner will have 24 hours to reply to my notification. If I don’t hear back after that, I’ll pick another winner.
*Update: This giveaway is now closed. Thank you for all of your wonderful entry comments!
Note: I received a free copy of Wings, Worms, and Wonder in exchange for providing my honest review with you here. Read my full disclosure policy for more information.
Thanks for sharing. So many fantastic ideas! 🙂
My kids and I love to grow tomatoe plants. They are always in awe of how many tomatoes we yeild every year! rachelcirone@yahoo.com
Our favorite thing to plant is strawberries. I'm allergic but the kids love them and they are so pretty. Last year we had a small hanging strawberry plant. A robin decided it was the perfect place to make a nest. reginaborysenko@gmail.com
We plant tomatoes and basil every year. It its so fun to be cooking and send out my 5 & 2 year old to pick Some for dinner. Growing sunflowers was a great experience too.
There are so many things we do in spring…our mud pit, dig for bugs, make fairy houses, plant oodles of veggies, hike in the woods, etc. But one things we started last spring, which we will do again this year is plant carrots in cement cinder blocks! It looks cool and makes pulling them out easier! amandalj@optonline.net
What a cool book! My daughter and I love to garden and get outside. Each year we start our seeds inside and then track their growth weekly. My daughter's favorite is when it is time to pick the carrots. Nothing seems more amazing to her than how a plant on top of the ground can be a carrot underneath the ground.
I love to grow herbs and make lavender crafts with kids.
Stephanie, can you leave me your email address? Thanks!
We love to dig dirt and look for ladybugs and discovering any new bugs! Thanks for showing us this book! <br /><br />Kireikay@yahoo.com<br />
This looks perfect for our nature club! I volunteer with a small group of children at our local nature center so we have access to some of the materials you mention, such as butterfly and moth specimens. I am forever checking books out of the library and scouring websites for our activities. This would be so helpful for this age group. <br />I typed up a big story about squash bugs in the garden
Lovely. Our favorite garden adventures usually involve bugs. My daughter never tires of making worm and grasshopper habitats. And laying out all the Japanese beetle grubs for the birds. Hey, beats pesticides!<br /><br />Thanks<br />Vetchling78@gmail.com
We love to look for bugs in our garden! We can't wait to get our garden going this year. We are currently brainstorming some ways to make it fun and interesting – this book would be awesome! Thanks for sharing about it here!<br />going.va@gmail.com
Ohh, I forgot to add a link http://theeducatorsspinonit.blogspot.com/search/label/Kids%20in%20the%20Garden
I don't think I could pick a favorite thing to grow – but we do like to share the "gardening bug" with other children and share seeds and transplants with any interested budding gardener. In fact, I think I am at over 40 "kids in the garden" posts at our blog. This weekend we planted runner beans, tomatoes, peppers and lots more. My kids are just facinated by living
Would love to have this resource! I must say, as of today, my favorite thing to do with kids in the garden is to walk out first thing in the morning and see the little spouts of our freshly planted seeds. My son was SO excited! He hasn't stopped talking about it all day!Oh the excitement grows every day. I can't wait until he eats his first home grown carrot!<br /><br />Mary<br />
We love making compost and seeing what volunteers pop up from the year before.<br />
Great-looking book! Homeschooling my 4 and 10 years for the first time this year. We are looking forward to doing a lot if gardening for the first time this spring in our tiny little urban backyard. <br />Gktorrisi@hotmail.com
Our gardens have always consisted of beautiful blooms, tomatoes and basil. This year we moved and are looking forward to expanding our food gardens with raised beds, climbers as forts, with fairy gardens, toad homes, bug hotels, butterfly area and bird bath and houses. A garden to nourish our bodies and souls ( and all the little critters to)!
Spring has sprung here in California and I have been enjoying spending long afternoons with my son out in our garden preparing it for our seedlings. My son is 2 and everything is so interesting and new to him. He loves finding bugs, weeding, and digging. The two of us have also become quite the backyard bird watchers. I think I am learning as much as he is!! Kelley Johnson's book looks
What a fun giveaway! I love to garden and am very into growing flowers. My kids love to help me weed, or scout for aphids on my roses. We are also into butterflies and grow flowers specifically for them. Two years ago my son and dad built me a butterfly house so we are always looking out for "guests." Last year was a huge year for butterflies, one day we had 50 all over our bushes and
What an awesome giveaway! I started following your blog recently. I love growing tomatoes with my little helpers. We also enjoy building fairy gardens and photographing the tiny visitors to our garden during spring and summer.:)<br />
My ds loves helping me compost with a passion. It is truly one of the most dazzling adventures he's ever experienced with Mama Earth in all her beautiful splendor! And, he will tell you in his own special way, bright eyed and beaming, that the garden is lusciously blooming because of the the sun and moon, water, love and the magic of the compost!<br /><br />Thanks so much to you and Kelly for
This book looks really intriguing! I'm going to be homeschooling my oldest next year for kindergarten, and this book could be a great resource for our nature study! Two years ago we set aside a corner of our garden for my oldest (I was pregnant with his baby brother). We planted some sunflowers, salad greens, and a cherry tomato plant and bok choy and provided the kid-sized garden tools.
Awesome! We lived in a townhouse for the last 6 years, but I kept up a really productive container garden the whole time. I also covered the side of our townhouse with strawberries, and last year, I loved watching our kiddo crouch in the strawberry patch and search for those little red morsels. He loved it too! I'm sooo looking forward to having an actual yard and garden this year!