Half Term Fun: Growing Beans with Children

Early this week, I shared an Easy Sweet Recipe for Children – nice and easy, perfect to keep the kids entertained during half term.

While I was growing up in Brazil, I used to grow beans all the time. It was one of my favourite activities. My mum is a biologist, so she got me into nature.

As I did it so many times when she was a little girl, I wanted little man to try and grow some beans too. It is really simple to do, you only need beans, cotton wool and a little container to keep them.

You can use butter beans, found in the dried beans/ pulses section in supermarkets, straight out of the packet.

First you need to place a few beans on top of a cotton wool, then water a little every day to ensure that the cotton wool is moist at all times.

Little man added 3 beans to each plastic container. They should be kept indoors and away from direct sunlight.

Little man had a lot of fun watching the beans grow. As beans grow really quickly, you can see each morning how much it had grown from one day to the other. It is like magic!

If you start growing them now, you will see a big difference by the time the schools go back next week.

As soon as the beans reach a couple of inches tall, you need to move them from the container to the soil so they can have more space to grow. You can just plant them with the cotton wool, so the roots don’t get damaged in the process.

Once the beans are moved to the soil, you need to carry on watering daily and they will become little plants in no time.

Little man loved watching the beans grow!