This one started with a nursery rhyme. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” turned into a small garden you plant with numbers instead of seeds. Printable numbered flowers go on sticks, then get planted into a basket of playdough edged with shells, and a child orders them, finds them, and counts them. It is number practice dressed up as gardening, and it comes out again all spring. Ages 3 to 5.
Making the garden
Take a small basket or tub and fill it with playdough to stand in for soil. We used a leftover batch of chocolate playdough, which looks just like earth, and edged the rim with shells as a nod to the cockle shells in the rhyme. The playdough holds the flower sticks upright, which is the only thing the base really needs to do.
For the flowers, print a set of numbered flowers, as many as you want up to ten or beyond. Laminate them so they survive being planted and replanted, then tape each one to a craft stick and twist a green pipe cleaner around the base for a leaf. Push them into the playdough and the garden is ready.
Ways to play
The simplest version is number recognition. Call out a number and a child hunts through the flowers to find it and plant it. From there it grows into ordering: planting the flowers into the garden in sequence, zero through ten, and then doing it backwards, which is harder than it sounds. You can ask which number comes next, or which comes before, and let a child plant the answer.
There is a nice bit of early reasoning hiding in the flowers too. The number of petals does not match the number printed in the middle, so a child who tries to count petals to find the answer gets gently caught out, and the conversation about why is worth having. The garden takes the activity from simple spotting all the way up to ordering and comparing, which is why it keeps earning its place on the table.
For another activity that works on number recognition with small movable pieces, our dinosaur colors and numbers busy bag covers sorting and counting in the same hands-on way. And to carry the flower theme onto paper, our free flower coloring pages are a quieter follow-on for the same age group.