How gardening with your kids helps them learn

Flower power
Leave space in your garden for flowers, both wild flowers native to your region and the traditional annuals and perennials that add beauty to our yards and grace our tables. Teach your child how to pick them and arrange them in little vases in the house. Young children often prefer to put one special flower in a very small vase, rather than create large arrangements. You can use the nicely shaped bottles in which individual servings of drinks such as Perrier and Orangina are sold.

Keep your child's flower-arranging kit on a low shelf within her reach, As well as a variety of small containers for her use, you will also need a small pair of garden scissors to cut the flowers, a small pitcher to use for adding the water, a funnel to make it easier to pour water into the openings of small vases, and a sponge for cleaning up. You might even want to include some small doilies to place under the vases.

Flower arrangements allow your child to bring nature inside your home -- they add to the beauty of your rooms, as well as deepening your child's awareness of different plants and flowers.

Garden vocabulary
Teach your child the correct names of each flower, fruit and vegetable as they come into season. Before you know it, she will be able to name everything in your garden. You can also teach her the adjectives that describe them: red, large, small, long, rough, silky, and so on. Many plants also have practical uses in cooking and around the house. Aloe, as one example, is a wonderful ointment for scrapes and burns.

Hang beautiful pictures of plants and flowers in your home, both close-up art photographs and prints of famous paintings. Your child's library collection should include some of the many wonderful books about flowers, animals and the natural world that have been published. Children enjoy finding pictures of flowers or leaves they have found in their gardens in the pages of their books.

Crafts from nature
Don't forget that all sorts of crafts use flowers, leaves, seeds and grasses. Children love making art with natural materials. They can learn to use a small flower-press to preserve leaves and flowers, and mount them in scrapbooks. They can weave with grass and make little pine-needle baskets. Acorns and pine cones can be used for all sorts of crafts, such as making table decorations; and the branches of many hardwood trees that have pleasing bark can be used to make bark rubbings and nature collages.

Is your family suffering from nature deficit disorder? Click here to find out.

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Excerpted from How To Raise An Amazing Child The Montessori Way by Tim Seldin. Copyright 2006 by Tim Seldin. Excerpted by permission of Dorling Kindersley Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.