Garden Week

This summer my plan is to try to have a theme for each week.  I've been keeping a list of ideas for the past month to help me get started.  I knew I wanted our first theme to be a garden theme because I'm hoping the girls will help me more with our garden this summer.  

To get us started, I requested a bunch of garden books from the library (and bought a few special books to).  The books we read were

My Garden, Kevin Henkes (This is one of my favorite books right now!)

Annabelle Alpaca Plants a Garden, Jan O'Neill

The Carrot Seed, Ruth Krauss

The Curious Garden, Peter Brown

Yucky Worms, Vivian French

We read some or all of the books every day.  All week, we also worked in our big garden.  We dug up some worms.  We looked at our carrot plants. We watered and weeded. Each day we also did another garden related activity.  In total with reading, weeding, watering and other activities we probably did about an hour of garden related things during the day, so we still had time for playing at the park and other summer fun.

One day, the girls and I headed to Menard's, and so we could pick out flowers for our window box.  Miss A picked out some beautiful purple flowers (no surprise there). She made an excellent little helper.  She loves watering plants the most.  And she loves that the flowers are now right outside of her bedroom window.

Another day we painted pots. I picked up some cheap clay pots when we picked up the flowers, and got some acrylic paints and foam paint brushes so we could keep the pots out on our deck after they were finished.  We already had some flower seeds that we planted in the pots after they dried.

Her tongue is always out when she's concentrating.

Don't you love how well Little J matches our picnic table :)

Inside, we used My Garden as inspiration for Little J and Miss A to draw their own gardens on our sliding glass door windows.  Both girls liked the idea of coloring on the windows, so I'm sure we'll do it again later in the summer.  I bought the Crayola Window Markers with Crystal Effects because there was a purple marker, and the regular window markers didn't have a purple.  The only problem was that the colors didn't show up very well on the window, and got kind of drippy looking the next day.  They would probably be better for bigger kids doing window drawings.