Creating Your Own Homeschool Garden for Homeschooled Students

If you are a homeschooler, consider bringing your classroom outdoors to the garden. I consider this to be my Charlotte Mason niche. I love to garden, and it is the perfect opportunity to use Charlotte Mason's techniques in our homeschool. Books on gardening line our shelves and garden tools line our garage. Boys love digging and exploring, and with the tools and books in hand, the great outdoors becomes one giant classroom.

Butterfly bushes we have planted over the years have become our butterfly habitat and provided us with many species of butterflies to delight our hearts and minds. We have spent hours watching the butterflies bustle around the bushes, compared the various types that have landed, and watched these beautiful creatures extend their proboscises as they feed. Blackberries and strawberries come back year after year, each crop bringing a more plentiful bounty! We use mint in tea and a variety of recipes once it starts popping up in the spring. To delight the senses, we sometimes walk through the garden tasting and smelling all of the delicious edible herbs and flowers. If you have not tried this, set aside some time to discover your garden in a new fashion!

Along with the perennials we have already added to our garden, each year we add a variety of annual flowers, herbs and vegetables. Sometimes, like this year, we plan a themed garden, while other years we just plant whatever suites us while we are shopping for seeds and plants. This year's theme is a bunny garden which contains specially selected items for our pet rabbit, Henry. We have selected special plants suited for bunny consumption: spinach, basil, rosemary, two varieties of lettuce and tomatoes. My two younger boys also want to grow their own pumpkins for Halloween this year, so we selected seeds for a pumpkin that is ideal for carving. Zinnias and Sweet Alyssum are always easy to grow from seeds and are a delight to children of all ages. Who does not love the bright colored, ever-blooming, carnation-like flower Zinnias produce?

On a nice spring day, sit outside with your drawing tablets and draw the nature you see before you. My boys have enjoyed doing this over the years. You can draw the flowers and label the parts, draw the different herbs in your garden and label them. You can collect specimens to place in a nature scrapbook, as well. Using the books from your shelves to note facts about each in your nature journal. We have even done science experiments with photo paper and various flowers and leaves. By placing the flowers and leaves on the photo paper and exposing them to sunlight for varying lengths of time, you can create masterpieces as you learn.

There is no end to what you can do in the classroom of the great outdoors. Everything from creating your own colorful paints and dyes to making art collages. One of our favorite activities is paper making. There are a variety of ways in which you can use your selected plants in paper making. You can make paper from the actual plants themselves, which takes longer and is more time consuming or you can use the dried plant material in recycled paper you create. We prefer the latter in our home school. Using a plant press, you can dry plants and flowers and then add them to your recycled paper pulp (using a kitchen blender and water).

No matter what activities you choose, the home school garden is sure to be an enjoyable classroom for all. Grab your books, garden tools, nature books and a fresh pitcher of lemonade and head outside to explore God's creation. It will refresh your soul and breathe new life into your home school.