My two sons (6 and 4) love to work in the yard and help out. They actually enjoy helping with the mulch and planting flowers or plants. We make it fun by picking up interesting flowers or plants that we can have them enjoy throughout the spring and summer.
They also love to help with blowing leaves in the fall and jumping in the piles of leaves, which I never realized was so dirty until I became a grown adult.
One thing that we did this summer was show our kids how to grow vegetables in our garden. We live in a pretty shady area of the city so it is hard to grow anything substantial, though we are trying asparagus this year. But we came across an old bag of potatoes in the pantry a few weeks ago and showed the kids that the potatoes were already growing, though they were scared to death the first time they saw these things with the green arms coming out of them.
So we showed the kids, as they participated, how you can put a potato (cut in half) under the dirt of the garden and actually grow food. This was about 3-4 weeks ago, and we had not had much time to check on the plants since, as they were really out of the way. Well, this weekend we were working in the yard and realized that the potato plants that we had planted were huge! Jennifer had initially thought they were weeds and pulled a few out, to only be surprised that they were actually potatoes.
We showed the kids what had happened and that we now had two (baby) potatoes that we had grown all on our own. We brought them in and washed them and then baked these two miniature spuds. They tasted delicious. Yes, they were so small that there was not even room for sour cream, but we did get a little butter and salt, and they were great.
This is a great way to engage your kids with nature, while also teaching them about how food can be grown and that it is better than what you get in the store
