I love these miniature gardens! While watching the videos I was thinking of how my students so often have indoor recess. My thinking is that if we could create miniature gardens in small groups, then that could be something for the students to tend to during indoor recess. That way, they are still connecting with nature! I would most likely use flower pots for each garden. I could help the students to fill them with rocks on the very bottom, and then dirt as a base. We could collect natural loose parts such as rocks, pebbles, sticks, pinecones and more. We could also plant things in the miniature garden such as succulents or moss. We have miniature plastic animals that the students may enjoy playin with inside the miniature garden as well. We could incorporate counting with the natural and manufactured loose parts as well.
Another way that I could incorporate counting would be to have the students write about the steps that they took to create their garden. We could use ordinal numbers (First I…Second I…) to describe the steps. This form of informational writing would bring together science, math and writing into one!