What can young children learn from a garden living classroom for young children? Perhaps you are an educator or parent seeking more perspective on how young children acquire knowledge through hands-on or experiential learning. In that case, this guide will point you in the right direction.
Our garden was featured in In Her Garden Magazine published by Stampington
When you think of a garden, perhaps a carefully crafted space comes to mind, one with structure, form, and plants, but a garden can become far more than a place to grow flowers or vegetables. When intentionally designed, it becomes a living classroom filled with opportunities for discovery, observation, learning, creativity, fluid movements, and social-emotional connection.
For young children, gardens naturally invite awe, wonder, and curiosity. A wiggling worm spotted in the garden soil, butterflies fluttering amongst flowers before landing on milkweed, the scent of crushed mint in the mud kitchen, or counting strawberries or peas, all become a living classroom, one in which books or indoor classrooms cannot replicate with paper. These experiences are rooted in real life.
children harvesting carrot and potatoes
You may wonder what kind of setting is best for children to fully gain understanding, but let me assure you that you do not need a perfect garden to begin. A few containers, a small raised bed, native flowers, herbs, grasses, or a corner left slightly wild can become an extraordinary learning zone for children and educators.
Add Perennials for Long-Term Learning
Perennials are plants that return year after year. Unlike annual flowers that complete their life cycle in one season, perennials go to sleep during winter and emerge again in spring. This is one of the most powerful opportunities to observe seasonal cycles, the land, changes, and growth over time. It is also a time for reflection, journaling, and slow pedagogical growth.
early years garden guide
Children begin noticing:
- withered plants (that almost look dead)
- shoots emerging from the soil in spring
- leaves unfolding
- flowers blooming
- pollinators arriving
- seeds forming
- plants fading in autumn
- dormant gardens in winter
Perennials help children understand rhythms in nature and provide continuity in the outdoor classroom.
Some child-friendly perennial choices include:
- spring bulbs like daffodils, tulips,
- columbine
- coneflowers
- black-eyed Susans
- obedient plant
- bee balm
- milkweed
- lavender (depending on your garden zone)
- yarrow
- salvia
- hostas
- sedum
Obedient Plant
These plants often require less work once established, making them practical for educators and families who want a sustainable garden space that grows without yearly manual labor.
You may have heard of native plants. Yes, they are perennials, but allow me to break that down for you.
Plant Native Flowers for Pollinators
Native plants are species that naturally grow within your region. Because they developed alongside local wildlife, they provide important food and habitat for bees, butterflies, birds, and beneficial insects. They are also more reliable in the garden, especially while we struggle with global warming.
Native flowers also tend to be hardy and reliable, returning season after season with less maintenance once established. Native plants can be grown from seeds, or you can purchase them yearly from conservation sites or your local forestry department.
Choose plants that bloom from spring through fall, so pollinators have a consistent source of nectar throughout the growing season. Here are a few plants you can add to your schoolyard. Note that you can do your own research to find an extensive list of native plants in your region. I am a member of Wild Ones, and I love what they offer to members https://wildones.org.
Spring Bloomers
- Virginia Bluebells
- columbine
- wild geranium
- woodland phlox
- prairie smoke
- penstemon
Penstemon in pollinator garden
Summer Bloomers
- purple coneflower
- bee balm
- blazing star
- black-eyed Susan
- cardinal flower
- blue Lobelia
- butterfly weed
- milkweed (swamp, common, whirled, etc.)
Late Summer to Fall Bloomers
- asters
- obedient plant
- goldenrod
- joe-pye weed
Now, I wouldn’t recommend you go out on a limb and purchase all of these plants at once. Yes, your outdoor classroom will greatly benefit from them, but small changes create the biggest impact. Build slowly and bring the children’s inquiry with you. You can guide their observational skills to stop and notice which insects visit certain flowers, how bees move from bloom to bloom, and how butterflies search for nectar. These observations naturally support early science skills and ecological awareness. In addition, your garden will attract more beneficial insects that will allow you to garden more fruitfully and joyfully.
Coneflower (echinecea)with painted lady butterfly
Grow Annuals, Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruit
A garden filled with annual flowers, vegetables, herbs, and fruit invites educators and children to engage in meaningful, hands-on learning experiences. While perennials provide a long-term foundation for the garden, annuals offer children the opportunity to plant seeds, observe rapid growth, and experience an entire plant life cycle within a single growing season.
We love growing plants from seed. One of the most impactful ways for children to learn about the life of plants is to plant seeds themselves and watch them grow. Through gardening, children witness germination, root development, leaf growth, flowering, fruit production, and seed formation. These experiences create a deeper understanding of how plants grow, ecological awareness, and landscape change over time.
Spring is a wonderful time to introduce young children to gardening, especially in regions where long snowy winters leave the landscape dormant for months. Planting seeds brings excitement, anticipation, and hope as children watch the garden come alive again.
Some vegetable seeds that are easy to grow with young children include:
- Radishes
- Sugar snap peas
- Onions
- Carrots
- Kale
- Lettuce greens
- Squash
- Corn
- Watermelon
Children harvesting radish
Flower seeds are equally rewarding and help attract pollinators to the garden. Some favorites include:
- Snapdragons
- Bachelor buttons
- Marigolds
- Zinnias
- Cosmos
- Sunflowers
- Wildflower mixes
We are especially fond of inexpensive seed packets from the dollar store, which often provide delightful surprises each season as unexpected colors and blooms emerge throughout the garden. In addition, these allow us to cut flowers and decorate our indoor classroom, which during the summer time looks like a floral shop – can you tell, I love flowers nd by default, the children get to appreciate the wonders of the outdoor garden.
pink cosmos
Herbs and edible plants add another layer of learning and sensory exploration. They are also materials you can add to your mud kitchen, water table, or sensory bins. Consider growing:
- Basil
- Mint
- Chives
- Parsley
- Dill
- Oregano
Fruit trees, berry bushes, strawberries, and cherry tomatoes can create excitement year after year as children eagerly anticipate harvest time. In our yard, we have apple and pear trees. One year, we grew apples from seeds, and now we have healthy trees growing in our backyard. If you have never grown apple trees from seeds, I encourage you to give it a try.
tomato on vine
Gardening encourages children to develop:
- Responsibility
- Collaboration
- Sharing and turn-taking
- Patience
- Observation skills
- Sensory exploration
- Healthy eating habits
- Stewardship of living things
the outdoor classroom guide
Children love:
- Watering plants
- Finding worms
- Looking for insects, especially ladybugs and caterpillars
- Finding small or ripe fruits, especially strawberries.
- Harvesting vegetables and fruit
- Eating fresh sugar snap peas
- Comparing plant sizes
- Counting produce, caterpillars, or birds
- Measuring growth
- Observing changes over time
Children watering the garden
These experiences may seem simple, but they support lifelong learning, science, mathematics, language development, and social-emotional growth while helping children build a connection to the food they eat and the natural world around them.
Gardens naturally slow children down, take them off screen time, and invite them to learn through real experiences, hands in the dirt, curiosity, and discovery. Studies show it also supports stronger immunity, mood, and social skills.
Annual flowers not only bring color to the garden but also attract bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects throughout the growing season.
Create a Butterfly Garden
Butterfly gardens open the world for vivid experiential learning with children. This allows them to witness metamorphosis firsthand. Did you know that some adults have never witnessed, in person, the stages of a butterfly or moth’s metamorphosis? I started raising butterflies when my children were little. I was given a chrysalis by a lady, and after watching the children’s intrigue and joy, I decided to create a butterfly garden. Watching a caterpillar transform into a butterfly or moth never gets old. Whether you are one year old or seventy-three, the experience reminds us that nature is full of possibilities waiting to unfold. Each year, the children in my childcare directly experience this beauty. It’s a ritual they joyously anticipate each warm season.
Here are some plants your pollinator garden will need to support butterflies and moths. Remember, you can combine both annuals and perennials.
Host Plants
These are the plants where butterflies lay eggs and caterpillars feed. Depending on your region, you may be familiar with painted ladies, sulfur butterflies, monarch butterflies, or swallowtails.
Examples include:
- milkweed for monarch butterflies
- dill and parsley for swallowtails
- fennel
- violets
Oak trees are host plants for many moth species, including the polyphemus moth. In fact, oaks support hundreds of species of butterflies and moths, making them one of the most valuable trees you can add to a wildlife-friendly landscape. Other trees and shrubs that serve as host plants include redbud, birch, willow, cherry, dogwood, and serviceberry. If you have enough space, consider planting one or two native trees as a long-term investment in biodiversity.
Willow trees are particularly beneficial for wildlife, but because of their extensive root systems, they should be planted well away from homes, foundations, septic systems, and underground pipes.
monarch on mexican torch sunflower
Nectar Plants
These plants provide food for adult butterflies, bees, moths, and other beneficial insects.
Did you know that nectar is not the same as pollen? Nectar is a sweet liquid produced by flowers that insects drink for energy. Pollen is the powdery substance often seen as yellow dust on flowers and on the legs of bees. As bees and other pollinators move from flower to flower collecting nectar, they also transfer pollen, helping plants produce seeds, fruits, and vegetables.
Let’s consider some flowers you can add to your schoolyard garden that provide food for the insects we depend on. Research continues to show declines in many pollinator populations due to habitat loss, pesticide use, and a lack of diverse flowering plants. Pollinators play a vital role in our food system. Without bees and other pollinating insects, many fruits, vegetables, and flowering plants would struggle to reproduce.
By planting nectar-rich flowers, we can help support pollinators while creating opportunities for children to observe nature up close and develop a deeper appreciation for the interconnectedness of living things.
Examples include:
- columbine
- penstemon
- zinnias
- borage
- coneflowers
- lantana
- bee balm
- Wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa)
- asters
- Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis)
- blazing star (Liatris aspera)
- Blue wild indigo (Baptisia australis)
- sunflowers
- anise hyssop
yellow sunflowers in schoolyard
Children can observe:
- insects drinking nectar
- hummingbirds swooping
- bees with pollens
- insects inside tubular flowers
- caterpillars feeding
- chrysalis formation
- butterflies emerging
Pollination in action helps create a generation of children who are less afraid of insects. These experiences create deep emotional connections to nature and help children develop empathy and stewardship for living things.
Your schoolyard should not only be beautiful, but it should leave space for some unkept adventure. While flowers attract butterflies, bees, and other pollinators, children are often drawn to the places that feel a little wild. A patch of tall grass, a natural hedge, or an area left to grow freely can become a place of wonder, hiding, observing, and discovery.
Leave Space for Grass and Wildlife
Our schoolyard is both tame and wild, a synchronicity that creates wonder.
Allowing small sections of ornamental grasses or natural grasses to grow supports wildlife in important ways. We’ve observed birds collecting fresh and dried materials to build nests. Within these spaces, insects, frogs, and rabbits seek shelter and protection.
Children enjoy watching:
- Birds collecting nesting materials
- Insects hiding in the grass
- Grasses swaying during the day
- Raindrops settled on blades of grass.
Grasses also add texture, movement, hiding places, and sensory exploration to the environment.
Children love to feel hidden, and while educators can often spot them, it is joyful to watch them disappear among the grasses as they play, observe, and imagine. Slightly wild spaces often become the richest learning environments.
Let’s explore how gardens support children’s learning across developmental domains.
tall grass in the schoolyard
Gardens Support Every Learning Domain
Now that you have an idea of plants you can add to your schoolyard garden, your next question may be how this supports learning objectives. Let’s connect the garden to educational domains:
Science
Children investigate:
- insects
- weather
- plant life cycles
- soil
- decomposition
- pollination
- habitats
You do not need expensive materials to support scientific inquiry in the garden. A few simple tools can help children slow down, observe, ask questions, and document their discoveries. Consider adding magnifying glasses, bug catchers, clipboards, binoculars, measuring tapes, or a simple homemade rain gauge. Children can observe insects up close, track rainfall, compare plant growth, talk about weather patterns, watch birds, and investigate the many living things in the garden.
Simple additions like these help to embody an outdoor science laboratory where curiosity leads the learning.
child holding a polyphemus moth
Literacy & Early Language
Gardens inspire:
- storytelling
- descriptive vocabulary
- conversations
- labeling plants
- garden journals
- nonfiction learning
- promotes friendships
The garden helps give children language, words, sentences, and opportunities to form hypotheses. Rich conversations naturally unfold outdoors as children share observations, ask questions, and make predictions about what they see happening around them.
Whether observing birds feeding, building nests, identifying flowers, watching insects move through the garden, or discussing changes in the weather, children are constantly building vocabulary and communication skills. Oral storytelling is especially rich in outdoor environments, where children’s imaginations are sparked by real experiences and discoveries.
We also bring books from indoors to outdoors. Stories about plants, insects, birds, weather, and the changing seasons help children make connections between what they read and what they observe in the garden. Through these experiences, literacy becomes expressive, relevant, and connected to the natural world.
children transplanting seedlings from winter sow experiment
Mathematics
Children naturally explore:
- counting seeds
- measuring growth
- sorting leaves
- comparing sizes
- noticing patterns
- sequencing life cycles
In the garden, I am often reminded that mathematics is all around us. The interconnectedness of mathematics seamlessly envelops our daily lives, often in ways we do not immediately recognize.
Children count while watering the garden, shelling pea pods, harvesting vegetables, spotting butterflies, counting birds, and collecting flowers. They learn through colors, shapes, quantities, and relationships. Even games of hide-and-seek involve mathematical thinking as children count, estimate, compare distances, and navigate space.
Sometimes children skip from 13 straight to 16 when counting. This is developmentally appropriate and not a cause for concern during the early years. Through repeated experiences and meaningful opportunities to count, children gradually strengthen their understanding of number concepts.
Mathematics can be found in the shape of flowers, the spirals of a sunflower head, the symmetry of leaves, the arrangement of petals, and patterns found throughout nature. The more we slow down and observe the garden, the more we begin to notice that mathematics is not separate from the natural world but woven throughout it.
children filling newspaper pots with soil
Social Emotional Learning
Gardens encourage:
- patience
- teamwork
- nurturing
- responsibility
- emotional regulation
- mindfulness
- confidence
- collaboration
children working together while gathering flower petals
See how we implement winter sowing for summer garden blooms HERE
When I observe my mixed-age children outdoors, I am often reminded of how capable they are. Like all young children, there are moments of disagreement, rough-and-tumble interactions, or frustration when someone wants a toy, a turn, or a particular outcome. Yet I am continually amazed by their ability to work through challenges, negotiate, solve problems, and return to play.
The outdoor classroom provides a space where children can work through their emotions. There is room to breathe, move, sit quietly, and regroup. Fresh air, open space, and time often help children settle their emotions in ways that are more difficult indoors.
The garden also supports teamwork and cooperation. I have witnessed children working with fewer watering cans or spray bottles than there are children. They learn to wait, observe, and share when another child is finished. These experiences teach patience and help children understand that not every desire can be met immediately.
book a coaching call with me
There are often unspoken rules in children’s play. Through these experiences, children develop agency, self-confidence, and the ability to communicate their needs. They learn to advocate for themselves, negotiate with peers, and build relationships.
For infants and nonverbal children, educators play an important role in supporting communication and helping children express their needs. Over time, children begin to develop the language, confidence, and social skills needed to participate more fully in the community around them.
The garden becomes more than a place to grow plants. It becomes a place where children grow friendships, resilience, independence, and a deeper understanding of themselves and others.
Art and the Outdoor Classroom
Art allows children to document what they observe in the garden. Through drawing, painting, sculpting, weaving, and creating with natural materials, children make their learning visible while developing creativity, observation skills, and self-expression.
Art belongs outdoors, too. In my trainings, I often advise educators that whatever we do indoors can also be replicated outdoors. Creating art in the garden encourages children to slow down, observe details, and express what they notice in nature. Outdoor art also provides children with access to natural materials, changing landscapes, seasonal inspiration, and larger spaces for creative expression.
child painting a shade outdoors
Consider adding:
- easels outdoors
- clipboards for sketching
- chalk stations
- flower pounding activities
- mud painting
- natural weaving
- loose parts art
- nature collage tables
Children may:
- paint flowers they observe
- create patterns with leaves
- sketch insects
- build sculptures from sticks and stones
- mix natural colors from petals or mud
Process art outdoors is less about perfection or a specific outcome and more about creativity, exploration, observation, and connection.
child making art with watercolor paint on canvas outdoors
Begin Small
I wish I could tell you I always knew what to do or how many plants I needed. The truth is, I started small, one raised bed at a time, and some years I didn’t garden at all. I remember that in 2020, during COVID, I was too numb to garden, but I went right back to it in 2021. You do not need acres of land or expensive materials to create a meaningful learning garden.
We started with:
A few pots.
A raised bed.
A few native plants.
A butterfly garden.
An apple tree.
A mud kitchen and lots of grass for children to play on.
A raised bed.
A few native plants.
A butterfly garden.
An apple tree.
A mud kitchen and lots of grass for children to play on.
child holding seedlings for transplant
It was enough to begin our journey, which has since morphed into a wildlife garden, a conservation garden, a monarch sanctuary, and a bird paradise. All I needed to do was begin and bring the children and families along on the journey.
Over time, the children began to use this space with greater focus and purpose. Their stories, questions, discoveries, relationships, and wonder unfolded. The more I observed their play and learning, the more I wanted to give them additional outdoor time so they could continue exploring and expanding their knowledge.
And perhaps most importantly, they begin learning that they are part of the natural world—not separate from it.
Want to learn more about my methods – book a consultation with me HERE
Until next time, I am Miss Sue your educator in the trenches with you -Much Love
Miss Sue holding a polyphemus moth beside the pollinator garden
