Growing Seeds Activities for Kids

Spring is the perfect time to learn about how plants grow from seeds! Here are some fabulous growing seeds activities for young kids.

These activities are appropriate for preschoolers up through the early elementary grades.

As many of you know, we moved to a horse ranch this past fall. Soon after we signed the contract on the property, I had the idea of starting a ranch school. Our ranch school is an outdoor academic school for 4 – 6 year olds with an agricultural theme and a huge hands-on component, and so far I LOVE IT! We have bunnies, chicks (soon to be laying hens), dogs, horses, and a vegetable garden, and the kids get to experience it all.

Our ranch school does not meet every week. I chose 6 Wednesdays in the spring for our spring “semester” and families had to register for all 6. Each week will have a different theme.

The theme of our first spring ranch school day was growing seeds! Here’s what we did.

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We started our morning by reading “From Seed to Plant” by Gail Gibbons. I love Gail Gibbons’ science books for young kids!

Then we planted our own bean seeds! I just used a bag of pinto beans from the grocery store for this. They will sprout every time! (Although I don’t think that you can plant pinto beans like this and actually get these plants to produce.)

I taught the kids about geotropism. This is a plant’s response to gravity. No matter which direction you turn the seed in the soil, the roots will grow down and the stem will grow up.

You can explore geotropism with plants too. Take a plant that already has a stem and leaves and lay the pot over on its side. The stem will make a turn and start growing upwards again!

Anyway, we observed geotropism with seeds.

It’s always fun to sprout seeds in a glass jar so that kids can watch what’s happening. We’ve done this in the past by lining the inside of the jar with paper towels. However, it’s sometimes hard to get the paper towels to stick to the inside of the glass.

One night while lying awake (haha) I had the idea of putting a toilet paper roll in the center of the jar and then stuffing cotton balls around the edge. It worked so well!!

You could also fill the entire jar with cotton balls, but that would take a lot of cotton balls. Adding the toilet paper roll was perfect.

Squishing the cotton balls down into the jar was a perfect fine motor activity for the kids!

With the size of jars that we used, we couldn’t fit cotton balls all the way around the edge of the jar, and that was fine. We had cotton about 2/3 of the way around, and that was plenty of space to plant 3-4 beans.

Arrange the beans so that they are oriented different ways. You want the hilum (the little notch in the bean where it was attached to the parent plant) to be facing upwards, downwards, and to the side.

Pour water over the cotton, and then wait for the beans to sprout!

It won’t take long. We could see roots starting to emerge on day 2. It may take a few days longer than this, but even if your sprouting process is slower than ours, it should go pretty quickly.

By Day 9, we had a scene out of Jack in the Beanstalk in our jar! Wow!

At our ranch school, we also spent some time planning what we will plant in our raised bed garden boxes.

Our soil here is TERRIBLE. Raised beds are the only way to go!

For one of our centers, I set up this station where the kids could write down what they thought we should plant.

I drew the pictures for the poster, but you could easily print out photos from the internet if you don’t like to draw!

The kids had a great time writing down their votes on what should go in our garden boxes! I probably should not have put blueberries on our poster because everyone picked those, and they really won’t grow very well in Texas. But, we’re going to do blackberries!

I had two other centers – building LEGO barns and scooping and pouring pinto beans! So fun.

We had planned to fill our garden boxes with dirt at our first ranch school day, but it was TOO WINDY. Crazy wind, in fact! So we did it at the second ranch school day.

I found these shovels at Lowe’s that were just perfect for the kids to handle.

We planted cucumber seeds in our first garden box. I plan to start green beans from seeds today or tomorrow, and then we’ll add tomatoes and bell peppers from plants. So fun!!

Our last seed activity was to match up seeds to adult plants. We talked about the fact that there is a huge variety in size and shape of seeds!