{ Earth day kids activities } Transformation

Part of our series of Earth Month activities for kids. Join us as we celebrate and learn about our earth all month long!

This is a magical time of year, when new plants start popping up out of the cold barren earth. Nature does some amazing transformations!

I was in Yellowstone in 1988 during the great wildfire there. I remember the burning trees and having to swerve to avoid smoldering branches in the roads. The destruction was unbelievable, but fires are agents of change and new growth sprouts out of that barren ground, too. It was amazing to go back years later and see the transformation.

Read: The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. In a city devoid of greenery, Liam stumbles into a staircase leading to an abandoned elevated railway. There he unexpectedly finds a few plants struggling to survive. He tends to them, and they begin to take over the entire railway. Others join in until the city is transformed. This is one of my son’s favorite books. He loves comparing the aerial map of the “dead” city in the front of the book with the transformed city in the back.

Explore:

• Look around for places where, like the Curious Garden, nature has escaped.
• Check out these photos of how gardens can transform unexpected places.
• Can you find places where nature can transform your house or your community?
• Are you planting a garden this year? Now’s the time to plan! Talk about what you’d like to grow, buy seeds, and make a garden plan. Have limited space? Try Square Foot Gardening — a method of intensively planting 12″ squares. We did this in our community garden plot with great results.
• Use GrowVeg’s garden planner (free for 30 days) to plan your garden, or draw up your own plans. Give a space to your kids so they can plan and take care of their own corner.
• Read about the Yellowstone fire. I was amazed at the different ways some trees in the Yellowstone forests have evolved to protect themselves against the threat of fire. This video explains one of them – the Lodgepole pine.