Making a garden helps children to:

• Be resourceful and imaginative
• Improvise and adapt ideas
• Make patterns
• Practise fine manipulation skills

Tip some rice or soil into a tray with a raised edge. Tap the side to spread it out evenly. Use a fork to draw paths and make patterns and borders with some pebbles, buttons or shells, twigs or cones can be trees; add some daisy heads and leaves. You can improve a gate from a mall box or piece of cardboard, and add a sign, for example ‘To Rachel’s garden’ on a post outside.

Your child will have lots of ideas of other things to add – a mirror for a pond, a bridge cut from an egg box, a washing line of wool between two twigs (a little bit of Plasticine will help them to stand upright) a cave from an egg shell.

The garden can be designed again and again!