A Homeschool Lesson: Planting a Fall Garden with Free Printables

I was planning on sharing a recipe today for preserved paprika peppers in olive oil; however, after seeing my pictures of last week’s homeschool lesson of the boys in the garden – I just had to share it with you.

About a week ago I posted on facebook how I was a bit saddened that I hadn’t started a Fall garden this year.  With the new baby, homeschool, and college lessons to plan for, I just didn’t want to overwhelm myself with more work.

Many people had mentioned, “why don’t you make a homeschool lesson out of it?”

I’m so new to homeschooling that I honestly hadn’t thought about it.  I’m following a curriculum and it calls for paperwork to be done. If I don’t follow the curriculum every day, I may fall behind, right?

The more I started to think about it, I realized that hey, I’m the teacher.  I can make my own lesson plans.  What an epiphany.

So that’s what I did – I made my own gardening lesson plan for the boys and they loved it.  I made sure to include what we’re learning in language arts, reading, and math.  Plus, it included science.

Planting a Fall Garden and Learning Along the Way

For this lesson, I created four garden tags with the images of a radish, kohlrabi, lettuce, and carrot to serve as our garden markers.

I started with a short lecture on the vegetables we would be sowing with, sowing, being our word of the day.

I then sounded out the name of the vegetable, one at a time, and the boys would take turns telling me which letter sound they heard.  So, I would say Carrot, ca, ca, ca.  One boy would say C.  I would then say… ah, ah, ah.  The next boy would say A, and so on until together we spelt carrot.

Once the vegetable name was written we wrote the date so we would remember later when we sowed our vegetables so we can chart the growth along the way.

Once that was done, the boys cut out their cards and I laminated them to withstand the weather.  They then used a glue gun to glue on popsicle sticks and finish their markers.

Once in the garden, the boys started by placing their markers in the soil.

Together, we looked at the seeds and evaluated the differences between their sizes, shapes, and colors.

We then used a cut out ruler, included in the printable, and used it to plant our seeds 2″ apart.  We then took that opportunity to practice skip counting by two’s.

Since the boys were doing this all on their own, there are WAY more seeds in the ground than should be and thinning them out is going to be quite the process.  But, hey… we had fun.

Along the way, the boys were digging in my side of the garden finding bugs and worms.

They were pretty excited when they found treasure as well.

To finish up the boys took turn watering their own gardens.  They’re pretty excited to have ownership over one entire plot.  Their responsibility is to keep it watered and weeded.

Once we were done sowing our gardens we finished up with graphing a bar chart on how many seeds we planted for each vegetable. (printable included)

When I asked big brother if he wanted to go inside to finish, he smiled and said, “no, I like being outside.”

Free Garden Lesson Printables

If you’d like to use these printables, feel free to download them by clicking here or the image below.

Do you have any fun homeschool experiences or lessons to share?  Please do so in the comments below 🙂  It’s great to learn from one another.