Imaginative ideas for greenfingered fun in the garden, with 30 projects and 500 step-by-step pictures.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden--home of the oldest continuously operating children's garden in North America--offers a groundbreaking handbook that helps parents, teachers, and community gardeners introduce kids to the pleasures of gardening. In addition to growing common plants from seed, children will become more aware of nature's cycles and earth's ecology, and enjoy a variety of fun projects.

“What better way to begin to explore the natural world than to experience the magic and beauty of a family garden.” —Arden Bucklin-Sporer, author of How to Grow a School Garden Many gardeners find that once they have children gardening goes the way of late-night dinner parties and Sunday morning sleep-ins. Raising kids and maintaining a garden can be a juggling act, leaving the family garden forgotten and neglected. But kids can make great gardening companions, and the benefits of including them are impossible to ignore. Gardening gets kids outdoors and away from television and video games, increases their connection to plants and animals, and helps build enthusiasm for fresh fruits and vegetables. Their involvement becomes the real harvest of a family garden. In The Book of Gardening Projects for Kids, Whitney Cohen and John Fisher draw on years of experience in the Life Lab Garden Classroom and gardening with their own children to teach parents how to integrate the garden into their family life, no matter its scope or scale. The book features simple, practical gardening advice, including how to design a play-friendly garden, ideas for fun-filled theme gardens, and how to cook and preserve the garden's bounty. 101 engaging, family-friendly garden activities are also featured, from making Crunch-n-Munch Vegetable Beds and Muddy Miniature Masterpieces to harvesting berries for Fresh Fruity Pops.

Celebrating the seasons provides a wonderful opportunity to embrace creativity together as a family. It’s also a fun way to decorate for, prepare for, and learn about the holidays we celebrate. In The Artful Year, you’ll find a year’s worth of art activities, crafts, recipes, and more to help make each season special. These artful explorations are more than just craft projects—they are ways for your family to create memories and mementos and develop creatively, all while exploring nature, new ideas, and traditions. The book includes: • Arts and crafts, using the materials, colors, and themes of the season • Ideas and decorations for celebrating the holidays together • Favorite seasonal recipes that are fun for children to help make (and eat!) • Suggested reading lists of children’s picture books about the seasons and holidays The 175+ activities in this book are perfect for children ages one to eight, and for creating traditions that appeal to all ages.

Your journey to a made-from-scratch outdoor space starts here. Transform your yard into a beautifully personalized retreat with 30 step-by-step projects! The finished pieces include creative pathways, unique support structures, DIY water features, clever containers, and special finishing touches that help bring your garden to life. With easy to follow instructions, lush color photography, and sidebars filled with helpful tips and additional ideas, Handmade Garden Projects is an inspiring step toward a more stylish space.

Creative ways to use the garden to inspire learning, for kids ages 4-8 Packed with garden-based activities that promote science, math, reading, writing, imaginative play, and arts and crafts, The Garden Classroom offers a whole year of outdoor play and learning ideas—however big or small your garden. Every garden offers children a rich, sensory playground, full of interesting things to discover and learn about. There's a whole lot of science happening right before their eyes. The garden can also be a place to develop math and literacy skills, as the outdoors offers up plenty of invitations to weave learning into everyday gardening. The garden classroom is a place where plants grow, and where children grow too.

Spend time growing and creating with the children in your life... Both a how-to and a meditation, Garden Crafts for Kids is a short, uplifting book that helps us appreciate nature, art, and the children we love. Inside this book, you will find creative ideas for craft-making using materials from our natural environment. Filling the pages are projects simple enough to complete with your toddler, and projects complex enough for pre-teens. There are few joys greater than nature and few activities more rewarding than crafting. Garden Crafts for Kids, Grow, Harvest, Create is a mindful look at taking life slowly, stopping to smell the flowers, spending time outdoors with our children and grandchildren, using our free hours to teach and learn and create.

Garden Crafts for Children is crammed full of inspirational ideas to get kids excited about gardening and nature. A wheelbarrow vegetable garden, cress caterpillars, an insect hotel and a sunflower alley are just some of the fun and creative ideas in this invaluable book. There are chapters on using creative containers from teapots to rain boots, windowsill gardening with foods such as cress and beans, and beautiful nature crafts such as picture frames and mobiles that can be made indoors. Whether your garden is big or small, and even if you don't have a garden at all, Dawn Isaac's wonderful garden crafts will keep kids entertained, with plenty of projects to fill every season. The 35 projects, perfect for children from ages 3 to 11, are designed to be achievable and affordable with simple-to-follow, step-by-step photographs and clear advice, and there is help on growing and gardening for children and adults alike.A Chelsea Flower Show award-winning garden designer, Dawn Isaac is passionate about passing on a love of horticulture to children, including her own. She writes on family gardening and garden design for the Royal Horticultural Society and the Guardian. Her children's gardening exploits are chronicled on her popular blog, www.littlegreenfingers.com. Dawn is also the horticultural consultant for Mr Bloom's Nursery, the BBC children's gardening show, and has spoken on family gardening issues at both Gardeners' World Live and the Ideal Home Show.

A refreshing source of ideas to help your children learn to grow their own patch of earth, Gardening Lab for Kids encourages children to get outside and enjoy nature. This fun and creative book features 52 plant-related activities set into weekly lessons, beginning with learning to read maps to find your heat zone, moving through seeds, soil, composting, and then creating garden art and appreciating your natural surroundings.DIV /divDIVAuthor Renata Fossen Brown guides your family through fun opportunities learning about botany, ecology, the seasons, food, patience, insects, eating, and cooking. The labs can be used as singular projects or to build up to a year of hands-on outdoor experiences. The lessons in this book are open-ended to be explored over and over–with different results each time! Garden Lab for Kids is the perfect book for creative families, friends, and community groups and works as lesson plans for both experienced and new gardeners. Children of all ages and experience levels can be guided by adults and will enjoy these engaging exercises./divSo, slip on your muddy clothes, and get out and grow!

Build useful and attractive outdoor features to enhance your yard and garden, using stone, brick, wood, or water. 35 DIY projects feature step-by-step instructions and clear color photographs.