Developed in partnership with Education Services Australia

No matter how large (or small) your garden, it's full of opportunities to grow your child’s vocabulary, strengthen their reading, and cultivate their calculation and data skills. Here are just a few ideas:

• have conversations about garden projects
  
  Lots of people in this area have mini gardens in pots. Let's go for a walk to see what plants are growing well, and decide if we want to make our own pot garden.
• use rich vocabulary when talking about gardening magazines, books and television programs
  
  That's a very formal garden style, isn't it! Do you like all the straight lines and edges, or do you like a more informal style, like a cottage garden?
• ask your child to help when you are researching plants in garden books, plant labels, and seed packets
  
  Check the seed packets to see if these flowers are good for a shady situation in clay soil. They need to be frost tolerant too.
• use rich language to describe plants 
  
  At first glance these weeds resemble the good grasses, but you can distinguish them by the shape and texture of the leaves: they are more pointy, and very rough. 
• read and follow instructions together
  
  These flatpack planter boxes should be pretty easy to put together, just like your building sets. Let's start by reading the assembly instructions.
• make lists of jobs to do in the garden
  
  How often do we need to fertilise the tomatoes?
  
  When can we start harvesting the passionfruit? 
• ask your child to help calculate areas, distances and volumes
  
  We need to know the area of this garden bed so we can decide how many plants to buy. Let's measure the length and width and work it out.
  
  These seedlings should be planted 30cm apart. How many can we fit in this row?
  
  For each square metre of garden, the label says we need one cap of fertiliser in one litre of water. Let's work out how many square metres we need to cover. 
• record data about your garden
  
  Let's make a chart of how many capsicums we harvest each week.
  
  It's very interesting comparing our rainfall records to Nan and Pop's records, because our climates are so different.

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