With very young children

You will need: gardening toys – buckets and spades, kneelers, watering can, wheelbarrow, fabric flowers or vegetables; some tiny plant pots; some sand and some dried peas to use as seeds.

Encourage the children to play with the toys in the sand. Finally, help the children to put some sand into a plant pot and then plant a pea ‘seed’ in it. If appropriate, you might talk about what might happen to the seed. An extension to this activity might be to sow some mustard seed on to damp cotton wool in an egg box lid for the children to take home.