Create a Children's Garden

Your garden, however small, provides an important space for your children to develop and learn. There are many physical and psychological health benefits to children of playing outside and exploring a natural environment. If children are familiar with outdoor play at a young age then this trend may continue when they are older. However encouraging some children to stay and play in the garden may not always be an easy task. If this is the case for with the children you care for take a look at your garden. See if you could make your garden more child-friendly and use it in a more inspiring way.

A Children's Garden

All children can benefit from a varied outdoor space that provides a range of experiences and opportunities for play. They need a space to engage in quiet play as well as active play. An environment that is a mixture of hard, soft, natural and man-made textures and surfaces will appeal to all children. Take a fresh look at your outside space and the ways in which you use it. Try viewing it from both a child's perspective and their height. Keep the plastic garden toys you already have and add some of the following ideas. All are easy and relatively inexpensive to implement.

Chill Out Time

Children love to have places to sit and also sometimes to hide so make sure you provide enough. A few sawn up tree trunks around the garden are ideal sitting places. An old car tyre works as a seat, is also great for rolling games and use as a container. Willow dens planted in the winter and runner bean tepees are great natural dens and provide shade on a hot day.

Natural Materials

Think about whether you have different natural materials available for play?   Collections of large pebbles and shells are great for sorting, stacking, and loading into toy buckets and wheelbarrows.   Grass cuttings, hedge trimmings and fir cones can be used in similar ways. Sand and soil provide endless opportunities for digging in. 

Movement
Do you have structures to encourage movement around your garden?  Stepping stones are always a great favourite with children.  Use sawn off logs placed around the garden or paving slabs already on a lawn.  A snake or train track chalked onto a pathway provides a temporary through way.  Have a go at creating an obstacle course from items within the garden. 

Get the Kids Growing

There are loads of ideas on this site on gardening with your kids.  If it all looks a bit daunting a simple way to get started is to take your kids on a trip to your local garden centre and buy small pots of herbs such as rosemary, sage and thyme. Let them help you either plant up a pot filled with multi-purpose or plant them straight into the ground.  As well as grow them they will be able to learn how to touch and smell them and then eat them.

Water

For safety reasons it is advisable to avoid ponds and other major water features if you have very young children.  On a hot summers day you can kit your kids out with small buckets of water and paint brushes.  Then let them paint the brickwork and fences and go wild with their water art.  An indoor plant spray filled with water is great fun.  Try placing an old picture frame on the ground and let the kids spray and paint their own pictures.  At the end of the day don't forget to let the kids help you water the garden. 

Your garden is a vital resource for your children.  So use it and be inspired by it, but most of all have fun in it.  For ideas on more projects such as garden dens and outdoor chalkboards take a look at our features page.