How to Select Gardening Crafts

Gardening is a craft and often an art in itself. Avid gardeners work to make the colors, shapes and bed arrangements of their flowers and plants pleasing the eye and the smell. But even children can help improve gardens with crafts both decorative and practical. Which crafts you select depends on many factors and demands careful deliberation as to appropriateness, practicality and learning value. Teaching children early to love and appreciate gardening is an achievement in itself.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Select Gardening Crafts

1. Find out about different types of gardening crafts: the decorative (rock paintings, pine cone art), the practical (bird house, flower pots) and the horticultural (planting flowers in patterns, choosing plants for a window box). Think about which one you would like to do.

2. Picture what you will do with the end product. If you are a teacher does the school or class have a garden? Do all the students have a place for the project at home? If this a family project will it take maintenance? Who will do it?

3. Ask yourself what you want the children to learn about gardening. Will they come away from the craft with a new skill or new appreciation of some aspect of gardening? Select a craft that has to do with this goal.

4. Use your own experience. If you don't find a project on the Internet or in books, think about what you like to do in the garden, what someone else taught you that you could pass on or a clever idea you spotted in someone's garden.

5. Search the Internet for specific garden craft ideas at sites like Free Nature Crafts and Family Fun.com.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider taking a complicated craft and simplifying it for you own needs.
• Try taking on a longer term activity, like creating an ant farm or planting an edible garden and cooking a meal with the vegetables you grow.
• Gardening crafts tend to be more complicated and difficult than other undertakings. Most cannot be done by very young children (though they could help with some aspects) and even older children will need supervision.