Home School Project: Gardening

This year I decided that we should start our garden. The children and I have been talking about it for a while and it has never been the right time. Something has always gotten in the way. Either a new baby, health problems, or something always came up that kept us from starting. Well, not this year. "How did we get started?" you may ask. Well...It started with prayer.
When we were in Georgia visiting Steve's mom, we worked outside doing some yard work. It felt great getting outdoors with the children and all of us working together as a team. At one point I worked on an overgrown flower bed and realized that I should be doing this with the children at home. So started my quest for a garden. I prayed to the Almighty about it. I had the desire, but I had little to put toward it. And the soil around our house is hard clay. It would require a lot of work. But I prayed about it
The Lord put it in my heart that the children should be part of the whole process. So I informed them that I was praying and they got excited. They wanted to pick out the vegetables that we would grow. They wanted to do the digging. They wanted to do it when it was 50 degrees outside!
So we got started. I had them make a prayer journal.

We prayed for the Lord to provide the things that we need to grow our garden.
With our prayer journal, I wanted to include lessons from the scriptures that would help the children make connections with their spriritual growth. There are so many illustrations that are made in the scriptures...so this was a perfect opportunity.

For example, today we talked about "soil". What kind of soil do we need to grow our seeds? We compared the soil found in my yard (the clay) with the potting soil I had to start the seedlings. Great science application too. Well we know in Matthew 7:11 that the "seed" is the Word of God.

(we planted some seeds today!)

So we talked about where do we plant the Word of God? What is the soil that the Word of God is planted in? We discussed that our minds are like the soil. It also needs to be ready for the seeds. What if the soil is hard and rocky? Will seeds grow really well in that kind of soil? We talked about a humble heart. A heart with a good attitude that is ready to hear God's word and learn from Him. A heart that is willing to do the things that the Bible says.

The children actually did pretty well with that. Maybe they didn't get it fully, but at some level they understood. And the little ones...well, they will get it later. Right now they are just going through the motions.


While the boys were working on their school work, Paul and Leah were water painting in the kitchen.

Another thing we did, as part of our journaling, was to plan out our garden.

The Almighty gave me Proverbs 61:5. We talked about how it was important to plan what we would do before we do it. So we got out our blocks and talked about sorting out the plants to different areas of our garden. And each child made their own sample layout of a garden on the floor with the blocks.

Leah explained to me that she was planting carrots!

Samuel has plans for corn, sunflowers, green beans and potatoes.

Joshua wanted mostly corn and carrots. Sam just told him to stay out of his garden.

This is the area of the yard that we are going to use for our garden.

It gets the most sunlight for most of the day! We need to till the ground and add sand to the soil to make it softer. Mr. Steve has volunteered his services. A friend has donated some fencing to keep the dog out of our work. As soon as that is delivered, we plan on breaking ground!

These are the boys' prayer journals. With each entry, they are to draw a picture of what we did or what we talked about. Then they either copy a bible verse or a prewritten prayer into their journal about what we talked about. As we get farther into our project, the children will come up with their own prayers.

The yellow book is Samuel's Journal.

And this is Joshua's Journal.

We are just getting started. As we progress, I will make more posts to share what we are doing.