Tiny Greenhouse

A lovely way to introduce toddlers to the concept of planting a seed and watching it grow, with the advantage being that growth is evident relatively quickly to keep your child interested.

The set up.

What you need to prepare before doing the activity with your child:

- small house shapes cut out of card (we named our greenhouses and put a planting date on them)

- zip lock sandwich size bags taped to the back of the card houses (leave the top unstuck and open)

- we used sunflower shoots and sunflower seeds (you must soak them for 8-12 hours before they are planted)

Other materials:

- cotton wool balls

- bowl of water

Step 1: Planting the seeds

- ask your little one to soak 5-6 cotton wool balls in the bowl of water

- they need to squeeze each ball to get rid of excess water

- then place all of the balls into the zip lock bag

- count out 10 seeds (we used a mixture of sunflower shoots and seeds) and put them into the zip lock bag

- seal the top of the bag 

This process provided a nice link with counting.

Planting the seeds.

Step 2: Monitoring greenhouse growth

- tape the tiny greenhouse to a window

- my son sat waiting expecting there to be some immediate growth but we used this time to talk about what he thought might happen. He enjoyed trying to guess what the seeds might grow into.

Monitoring greenhouse growth.

Bless him, my son was very disappointed when he woke up the next morning and there weren't big beautiful flowers blooming in his greenhouse. But he did notice that the seeds had started to sprout.

Disappointment on day 2.

He was very excited to notice much more growth by day 3. He enjoyed describing what he saw and counting the number of seeds he could see that had sprouted.

Day 3 growth.

After one week of growth my son was very excited with how much his greenhouse had changed. We had fun deciding which greenhouse had the tallest plant and which greenhouse had the most seeds that had sprouted.

This was a nice activity to teach my son about plant growth and it was also good for him to understand the concept of growth taking time (but not too much time that he lost interest!).

The end product.