K-12 Resources and Curriculum

 This website offers a variety of resources from a long list of books, lesson plans for elementary school students, specific activities you can add to your lesson plans, and so many more resources revolving around different aspects of gardening. If you are looking for a fun way to incorporate gardening into different types of lesson plans this website is for you! They also provide a free subscription where they send you ten kids gardening activities each month, automatically.  

This website provides free lesson plans and materials for grade levels k-12. It is easy to set filters on your search for your specific grade level with options for distance learning and in person learning. It also provides you with resources to develop your own program as well. It is a Resource Library! 

Growing Minds provides a classroom activity that is accompanied by a book with a short description of the activity and a suggested month for that activity to be the most applicable. This website is very well rounded in their activities, the PDFs that are attached to each lesson plan go over the intended goal, what materials you’ll need, and where it aligns with the Common Core Standards. They provide all of the information you need, so you do not need to do any extra research! 

 This website provides free coloring worksheets that specify which grade level they match up with the best. The website also has guided lessons, lesson plans, hands-on activities, interactive stories, online exercises, science project ideas, song videos, and printable workbooks! 

 Raddish Kids is a website that focuses on recipes, cultures, and holidays that affect gardening and the food grown in the garden. A favorite activity they have on this website is called Grocery Games, which could be a cool homework assignment for students to go to the store with their parents and find everything on the list. There are not any lesson plans on this website, so it is not the most ideal for the classroom but they have some ideas worth glancing at. 

 This website provides gardening and botany lesson plans and activities as well as children books, gardening worksheets, clip art images and a couple links to lead you to more useful resources. 

 This website has so many resources that involve online and in person learning for students k-12. 

 This website contains a list of books that are geared towards kids the ages of 4-12 from the creators at PBS.

• From Seed to Plant, by Gail Gibbons, Age 4-8
• How a Seed Grows, by Helena J. Jordan, Age 4-8
• Oh Say Can You Seed?, By Bonnie Worth, Age 4-8
• A Seed is Sleepy, by Dianna Hutts Astion, Age 5-6
• Gardening Lab for Kids by Renata Fossen Brown Age 8-12
• Growing Vegetable Soup, by Lois Ehlert, Age 1-4
• The Vegetables We Eat, by Gail Gibbons, Age 4-8
• Flip, Float, Fly Seeds on the Move, by JoAnn Early Macken, Age 6-9
• The Flower ALphabet Book, by Jerry Pallotta, Age 4-8
• Berries, Nuts, and Seeds, but Diane Burns, Age 7-10
• The Carrot Seed, by Ruth Krauss, Age 4-8
• Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!, by Candace Fleming, Age 3-8
• If You Hold A Seed, by Elly MacKay, Age 5-8
• Jack’s Garden, by Henry Cole, Age 4-8

 This website has a list of books picked by fellow teachers that they love and use in their own classrooms. The grades that are targeted are elementary school students.  

This website contains a list of great gardening books for kids put together by Southern Living. They also include the price for the books according to Amazon and bookshop.org. 

This website is a great tool for teachers looking to appease the teaching standards while also teaching outside of the box. This website is full of a media-rich curriculum that is geared toward engaging digitally-savvy students. Their goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think so they are able to engage constructively with others. 

This website provides a platform for teachers to support each other by sharing their content and receiving compensation for it. This link specifically will bring you to garden coloring pages, but there is a plethora of other resources that this website provides. 

Some of the biggest life lessons come from teachers in the classroom sharing  stories that add a personal touch to their lessons, so here is a section of websites that include life lessons that can be intertwined with gardening! 

 This website goes over many great life lessons that intertwine gardening including:

• Where food comes from
• Patience to succeed 
• Growing food takes a lot of work (a lot of it) (also teaches appreciation)
• Learn from your mistakes
• We can't control everything
• Trash can become treasure
• Beauty isn't everything

 Some of the life lessons included in this website that relate back to gardening are:

• Learning to look at things from a different perspective can save you a lot of heartache
• Optimism is important
• The most beautiful things in life are sandwiched between a rock and a hard place
• It’s okay to be alone sometimes
• Every good thing requires hard work
• Failure is the necessary stepping stone to success
• The unexpected can often be beautiful and magnificent

 This website is more science lesson plan based than garden specific, but they provide some cool earth day ideas along with a plethora of different science lesson plans for grade levels k-12! 

 This link provides lots of ideas for Earth Day lessons and activities. The website overall provides lots of resources for every subject K-12 for teachers as well. 

 This website provides a lesson plan for grades 3-5 involving the subjects earth science, geography, and human geography. The activity is 35 minutes long. They include all the directions, objectives, and preparation you need to do this in your classroom.