I’m a big fantasy and sci-fi geek.  Slowly but surely my four year old daughter is becoming one too.  We have a Star Wars piggy bank, she asked for a dragon sword for Christmas last year, and she loves dressing up as a princess.  She’s also becoming very good with the computer.  She plays games like Elmo’s keyboard-o-rama, watches online movies from netflicks, and enjoys crawling into my lap while I’m working on the computer.

We’re also setting up home-schooling lessons for her as she expresses an interest in various things.  This has involved building a chicken coop, getting an ant farm (more about that later – let’s just say it didn’t turn out well), and our most recent purchase was a butterfly farm with 10 baby caterpillars that will hopefully become beautiful butterflies.

So, I recently started my garden seeds for the spring.  I was really excited about going to the store with her and picking out seeds and getting them started in a little seedling greenhouse.  She was excited about getting the seeds – and I also picked up a 72 disk seed starting kit greenhouse for around $7.

The concept is pretty simple – you have bunch of compressed disks of peat in a plastic container.  You pour water in, plant the seeds and put the cover on.  Seeds sprout in a couple of weeks and you put it in sunlight until they are big enough to plant outside.

Park's One-Step® Seed Starter: (photograph of Park's One-Step Seed Starter)

Unfortunately, her interest in planting seedlings got about as far as opening the seed packets and discovering that the seeds inside looked nothing like the picture on the outside of the packet.

She loves the garden – loves to pick tomatoes straight off the vine in the spring and summer and helps pick peas and beans in the fall.  But I think there was just too much disconnect between the seeds and having them grow into plants for a 4 year old.  So I was left at the kitchen table finishing up the planting while she wandered off.

It got me to thinking about how I could teach her about the planting process and gardening and somehow compress the time-to-gratification into something more manageable for a 4 year old.  And as a computer geek, my mind naturally turned to computers.

With all the simulation games out there – maybe there was something I could use to help teach her the fun and exciting world of essentially watching grass grow.  I vaguely recalled a SimFarm game from years ago.  With a little digging, I even found a site where abandoned titles go to have a second life.  You can download the game here.  Unfortunately, it’s probably a bit much for a 4 year old to handle screens like these…

 

 

So – What else is out there?  I have to say that it was a little difficult to find kid friendly games about gardening, composting, and plants.  Guess there’s not that much money in making things you can’t blow up.  However, here’s a short list of games I thought were interesting and kid-friendly:

  • Compost 4 Fun : Bravekidgames.com is a great website for kid friendly games.  This particular game is a bit hard to control with the mouse (the screen sort of bounces around) but it’s a great way to start a dialogue about what can be composted.
  • Garden Dreams : Well, I wasn’t able to get the online version to work for me because I’m behind a firewall – but it looks like fun.
  • Alice Greenfingers: Graphics aren’t great and you only get an hour of free play before you have to purchase it, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in playability.
  • Garden War: Ok, it is a war/strategy game – but it’s with garden gnomes.  Doesn’t use timers and teaches strategy so kids can probably get the hang of it pretty quickly.  Don’t know how kid-friendly tanks are though.

I’m going to have to try a couple of these over the weekend with my daughter and see if they’re really as kid friendly and interesting as I think they are.  I liked them and I thought they were fun, but as they say the proof is in the pudding…

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