Ways to Use Gardening to Sharpen Your Children's Math Skills

Looking for a way to sneak in some math skills practice for your young learner? Let your garden help! The garden offers many ways to bring math to life, including interactive models, hands-on activities, and practical applications.

1. Counting - Encourage students to to count flowers, plants, bugs, worms, seeds and whatever else you might find.
2. Comparing Sizes - Children can compare sizes of plants, fruits, vegetables or flowers while walking in the garden.  Modeling words like big, bigger, biggest, small, smaller, smallest, tall, and wide.
3. Addition and Subtraction - Count the plants in two different garden beds and then add the numbers together. Did some of the plants die?  Then make it into a subtraction problem
4. Measurement in the Garden - For younger kids, you can bring a ruler out to the garden and measure the height of plants. As children get older, involve them in planning the garden.
5. Calendar Skills - Sit down with a calendar and the seeds you are going to plant and read the directions on the packets together.  Determine when you can plant the seeds.  Then determine when you will be able to harvest them by counting on the calendar.
6. Multiplication and Division - If you have older children, you can work in multiplication and division, especially during the planning of the garden.
7. Area in a Garden - Area is a math concept that naturally fits in the garden.  You have to know the area of your garden bed to know how much you can plant there!
8. Fractions - You can build off the idea of area discussed above by talking about how much of each bed a plant takes up. 
9. Graphing Your Garden - Gardens are a great inspiration for practicing graphing.  Bar graphs are great for showing how many of each type of fruits and vegetables you have growing in the garden.