Summer Camp Recap: My First Garden

By Carolyn Carlins

Summer Camp Recap - is our weekly seasonal segment featuring our summer camp programs. This is the place for camp parents to find pictures of their campers in action and see all the fun things we did all week. It’s also a great place for educators to pick up craft, story and lesson ideas for their own early childhood programs!

My First Garden

Last week we hosted our Little Sprouts for My First Garden! Everyday our 2-4 year old campers explored the joys of gardening through singing, dancing, and creating. Throughout the week campers tested out their own green thumbs and got creative with the different ways we can use plants.

Day one we learned what plants are and made plant friends out of grass seed and knee highs. Campers got a glimpse of the wide array of shapes and colors that plants can be and explored everything from the banana plant to succulents. Then we ventured into the conservatory to look at some beautiful orchids, ferns, and of course, butterflies!

Day two we focused on the beginning stage of a plant’s life- the seed! Campers learned about the different shapes, sizes, and colors that seeds come in and even used seeds to make drums. Everyone was a star in our seed play, where we learned about all things a seed needs to grow into a healthy plant, and we ended the day by exploring the Discovery Garden.

Day three focused on the plants that we eat. Campers used different vegetables as stamps to create colorful pieces of art before planting their own edible treat. We toured Phipps’s edible garden to take a peek at all of the food growing on our roof top garden

Our final day of camp focused on the critters that live in our gardens. Everyone got a chance to observe and hold some of the Red Wiggler worms that live in the vermicomposting bin. Next, we made bird feeders to help attract birds and planted sunflowers to welcome bees and other important pollinators to our own backyards.  

If you would like to read and learn with your own Little Sprout, here are some books suggestions from the week:

Here are some book suggestions from the week:

Inch by Inch-The Garden Song by David Mallett

Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

A Seed is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston & Sylvia Long

Some Smug Slug by Pamela Duncan Edwards

Pattern Bugs by Trudy Harris

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert

Up Down and Around by Katherine Ayres

What’s This? By Caroline Mockford

Homegrown Science - Seed Dissection

Try this activity with your Little Sprout at home!

What is a seed? Every seed has three parts: a coat, a baby plant, and stored food. Your little sprout can conduct and experiment to view and identify these different parts. Dissecting lima bean is a great way to view these seeds. To prepare this activity, soak a few lima beans in water overnight.

Scientists ask questions and make guesses about the answers all the time. This is called a “hypothesis”. Ask your seed scientist to guess what might be inside a seed? To find the answer you and your little sprout can do an “experiment” and open up the seed to see what is inside of it.

Take the seed apart to find its three “body parts:

• Seed coat: protects the seed (Outer layer of the seed)
• Baby plant or embryo: grows into the large plant (This is the smallest part)
• Stored food or cotyledon (Cot-a- lee-don): gives food to the baby plant until it can make food from the sun (This is the largest part of the seed).

All photographs taken by Phipps' Science Education staff.