🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 😌 Patience & Delayed Gratification — Experiments with delayed results — growing plants, watching crystals form, tracking weather — teach children to wait for outcomes rather than needing immediate feedback, a skill that predicts academic and life success.
- 🔄 Flexible Thinking — When an experiment produces an unexpected result, children practice adapting their thinking — a form of cognitive flexibility that makes them more resilient learners across all subjects.
- 🤔 Critical Thinking — Making a prediction, testing it, and explaining the result develops logical reasoning — the ability to move from observation to explanation that underlies all scientific, mathematical, and analytical disciplines.
- 🌱 Curiosity & Wonder — Science that feels like magic cultivates the sense of wonder that keeps children asking questions throughout their lives — the foundational attitude that drives all learning and discovery.
You don't have to be an expert on botany to plan some fun science activities with your preschooler using plants. Taking the time for fun preschool plant experiments is a wonderful way to get your child interested in nature, get your child outdoors and spend quality time with your preschooler.
Featured Garden Activities for Preschoolers
Preschool Plant Activity - What Happened to the Dinosaurs?
Does your preschooler love dinosaurs, but doesn’t understand why they’re not around anymore? Or are you looking for a preschool plant activity to explain why plants need the sunlight? With this fun and easy preschool plant activity, your preschooler will understand how the dinosaurs died out and the importance of sunlight to plants.
Preschool Plant Activity - Pressed Flowers and Leaves Nature Book
Help your preschooler start a nature book by pressing flowers and leaves. Create a wonderful educational opportunity for them as they learn all about the names of plants and the parts of flowers and leaves by building their own nature book.
Potato Plants - How to Grow a Sweet Potato Plant
Start off simple preschool gardening with this wonderful kids' science activity. You and your preschooler can learn how to grow a entire sweet potato plant with a sweet potato and some water. Let your preschooler learn all about roots, stems and leaves with this fun science experiment.
Featured Preschool Plant Books
The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds: A Book About How Living Things Grow (Magic School Bus)
This is cute book in which classroom students hop onto a 'magic bus' so they can rescue a classmates plants. On their trip, they'll actually go into a plant and learn all about the different parts of plants. Full of fun illustrations and a clever story, this book would be great for preschool educators or preschool parents who want to teach preschooelrs all about plants.
Around PreschoolRock.com
Preschool Flower Jewelry
Make jewelry from flowers and leaves. Your preschooler will have fun exploring nature with this nature preschool craft. With just a few flowers, your preschooler can make a necklace, bracelet, pin, earrings and crown.
Make a Nature Collage
Help preschoolers appreciate nature and the world around them while getting exercise at the same time. Making a nature collage requires a few simple materials and encourages preschoolers exploration of everyday life.
Empowering your Preschooler
By letting your child make decisions, you allow her to develop a sense of autonomy and keep power struggles to a minimum. It's all in the approach - and you still get the behavior you want!
Hi! I'm
Theresa Halvorsen, the preschool science and nature writer for Preschoolrock.com. I have twin boys and am blown away by their fascination with preschool science and how the world works around them. I am always looking for fun and simple science activities so preschoolers can learn about science and the natural world. Please
contact me with any suggestions, ideas or questions you have about this site.
Helpful Tips for Parents - Outdoor science (nature observation, weather tracking, garden study) is as rigorous as lab science and has the added benefit of physical activity and environmental connection. - Always ask "What do you think will happen?" before running an experiment. Prediction is the core of scientific thinking, and preschoolers' predictions are always worth hearing. - Repeat experiments multiple times. Reliability — the same result happening consistently — is a key scientific concept, and repetition gives preschoolers the proof they find satisfying. - Science is everywhere: the kitchen, the garden, the bathroom, the driveway. Narrating daily life as science keeps curiosity active between formal experiments. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Should I explain the science behind experiments, or let children discover it? Sequence matters enormously: always let children observe and wonder before explaining. "What do you notice?" and "Why do you think that happened?" should precede any explanation. If children ask why, give a simple, accurate answer — never give incorrect explanations to protect the mystery. After the child has observed and hypothesized, confirming or expanding their theory with correct information is appropriate and satisfying. Explaining first removes the inquiry that makes science learning durable. ### How do I keep science learning going between experiments? Science is a mindset, not a schedule. Keep a magnifying glass accessible for impromptu investigation. Ask "why do you think...?" during daily life. Notice scientific phenomena out loud: "Look at how steam rises from the soup — where does it go?" Maintain a simple nature observation area (a window bird feeder, a terrarium, a weather chart). The child who develops the habit of curiosity about the physical world is doing science continuously, not just during scheduled experiments. Related reading: See also our science experiments at home and our nature walks guide for more ideas on this topic.
