Notes from the Garden

Post by Gerard Gonzales, Outdoor Education Specialist at Kidspace Children's Museum



We just wrapped up the Spring Cycle of the Lil' Sprouts Garden Club at Kidspace. Ten members of the club helped plant and water the garden for six consecutive Mondays. Each week had a different theme. We started with the spring garden and toured the Kidspace grounds: smelling the beautiful smells, exploring nature’s activity and all the new blooms. Butterflies fluttering through the garden were our second week topic, then the worms tunneling through the soil and turning our scrapes into compost filled our third week—munch, munch, munch, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, poop, poop, poop.



With a joy for bugs we turned our sessions back to plants. The fourth week we talked about roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds. Well that’s six parts, six parts, six plant parts that plants and people need. After a yummy six-plant-part salad, we decided flowers were our favorite, so we made them the topic for week five. We planted three types of flowers that week: sunflowers, Echinacea and amaranth. They were just little seeds but soon they will be pretty flowers stretching to the sky.



Having checked out all the cool flowers in the garden, we saw bees and talked about them during our last meeting. We visited the Kidspace bee colony and searched for the queen while watching the workers and drone buzz around the hive. We checked out the pipe where the bees fly in and out and followed a few workers around the garden, doing the honey bee dance. It was a great six weeks with lots of work making the garden beautiful, lots of fun listening to cool stories, lots of creativity making amazing crafts and lots of yummy adventures trying new foods. We will be starting up our next Lil' Sprouts Garden Club Summer Cycle in July, and look forward to having another group of hard working and adventurous 4- and 5-year-olds join us!