Herbal Education for Kids

Here are simple and fun herbal education resources for teaching children. We use these high quality herbal books, posts, and courses to teach our kids about the usefulness of herbal plants. Herbs are such an easy homeschool subject, as well as a fun family topic for crafts and foods!
This article has been updated from its original publication in 2015 to better serve our readers. Happy Herb Learning!

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If you’re a homeschool parent or would simply like to enjoy some educational (and super fun) time with your family, consider herbal education for kids you love! Learning about herbs:

• provides a practical education in useful plants
• inspires delcious recipes
• creates fodder for natural crafts
• provides ingredients for homemade beauty and cleaning products

…and gives us an opportunity to get our hands dirty and our senses alert as we learn to work with these great plants!

Please Note: I’ll be mentioning a lot of books in this article but you’ll notice I don’t have Amazon links for you to follow to purchase them. I’m sorry if this creates an inconvenience for you, but I stopped supporting Amazon ads on my site several years ago and I have yet to find a suitable replacement.

• I typically buy my own books used through Thriftbooks.com, if you’d care to check them out.

Herbal Education – Educator Resources

To help you get started with herbal education for kids, we’re going to simply share the resources we’ve used over the years in our homeschool classes. We have a smattering of books, courses, and even a game to engage your kids with herbs this year.

Herbal Education for Kids from Courses

If you want a ready-made learning resource, then I suggest an already assembled course (as opposed to putting one together yourself). Herbal Academy is often my first stop when looking for an herbal course for my homeschool year. Here are just a few we’re doing this year.

We’re taking the Botanical Drawing Class so that we more acurately record the herbs we’re growing in our own wellness herb garden, as well as our culinary herbs. We’re also taking the Materia  Medica course this year.

This course will help use indentify and record all the wild herbs growing on our land and in our area so that we know which herbal resources we have on hand in a pinch. We use these plants medicinally and for food, but also for crafts and fun.

The other course we’re taking is the Mushroom Course – so excited for this one! We have a lot of native mushrooms in our area, but we’re also going to be plugging the downed oaks in our woods with mushrooms spores. The course focuses on foraged mushrooms but we wanted to get started with what we already have on hand.

Herbal Education for Kids from Books

The following are some of the books we recommend for both younger and older students. Teens can usually make use of the herb books and courses you use for yourself.

If you can’t afford to buy a bunch of new herb books for your younger kids right now, you can take the material you have and adapt it by creating simplified unit studies. If you’ve never created your own unit study – a collection of lessons customized to your kids on a specific topic – I invite you to read our article entitled, How to Write a Homeschool Unit Study.

In the body of that article are some free worksheets that you can download and use, as well. 

Herbal Education Book Suggestions

Rosemary Gladstar’s books are great for beginners. She’s a little hippy-dippy but she’s very lovable and knowledgeable. A good one to start with is her beginner book, Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide. Good graphics, simple text, doable things to make and use.

The Complete Book of Herbs, by Lesley Bremness, is full of really useful graphics, growing information, recipes and crafts. This was actually my first herb book and I still reach for it before all my others. It’s cozy and visually appealing.

• The best part about it is the herbal profiles included – a picture of each seed, leaf, flower, root and stem. Be sure to look for it used because you can find it for pretty cheaply.

The Herbal Yearbook, by Gillian Haslam makes herbal education easy all year long because she has, literally, an herbal tidbit for every day of the year! You can share a simple fact about a chammomile on Monday, try planting it on Tuesday, make tea with dried chamomile on Wednesday, try a natural dye project on Thursday, and press fresh chamomile flowers on Friday. So easy!

The Backyard Herbal Apothecary, by Devon Young, is a newer book but has become one of my favorites. This book is ALL about herbal education. There’s a heavy emphasis on learning to forage native herbs in various habitats, though there are plenty of plant profiles on those you could grow in the garden.

• The information is clearly presented and outlined. It would be simple to write a report on each herb, if you needed a quick assignment completed.

A Kid’s Herb Book is the one we use most often in school. Again, a little hippy dippy at times, but it’s set up in such a way that you can pick and choose what you want to use. There’s herbal information and history, as well as crafts, recipes, herbal lore, and easy school projects. We’ve had a lot of fun with this one!

Herbal Eduction for Kids: Wild Herb Foraging

While not always focused specifically on herbs, many foraging and natural craft book end up discussing herbs a great deal because so many wild plants have herbal actions. We have a number of foraging resources outlined in our article, Foraging Free Food, that we suggest you peruse and purchase as you can.

For the youngest students, especially, it’s good to first go over with them the plants that are not safe to eat or sometimes even touch. We have the great book, Moonseed and Mistletoe, by Carol Learner.

Once you’ve trained them on which wild plants NOT to use, you can turn your attention to all the amazing things you can do with wild herbs. One of my favorite books for young herb foragers is Hyrum Goes Foraging. 

• This book highlights common wild herbal plants that are found in many places through the temperate Northern Hemisphere.
• It also shows a family foraging together, which I love, and has very clear pictures so you recognize the parts of the plant easily.

Herbal Eduction for Kids: Craft Books

Hands on activities cement basic knowledge of herbs, which is why I love herbal crafts books. There are a lot of books you could potentially use for this category of herbal learning, but the following are a few of our favorites.

Papermaking with Garden Plants and Common Weeds is a wonderful book for papermaking nerds like me. Even if you’ve never made paper before, this book can help show your kids how versatile herbal plants are and the many useful things we can do with them.

Similarly, books like The Organic Artist and Nature’s Art Box give the creative child the chance to craft from scratch and from nature. Getting outside, touching the dirt, harvesting the herbs and sticks and flowers is a healthy side benefit to all this herbal education for kids.

Another set of herbal craft books that come in quite handy are natural dye books, which can include project for fiber, food, and more. In fact, you may decide to plant an herbal dye garden; you might be surprised how many herbs are suitable to use as natural coloring agents!

Here are some of the books we’ve used in our family for natural dye projects:

• Natural Color, by Sasha Duerr; you can read our review of this book in our article: Reduce Waste with Vegetable Dyes.
• Chri McLaughlin’s, A Garden to Dye For, is equally useful and is unique in that it’s so small that my younger children liked it simply because it was pint-sized like they were.

Janet Garmen of Timber Creek Farm and Free Range Wool has a natural plant dyes course that you  might want to try. I purchased it for my kids and we’re set to go through it this year. I’ll let you know how it goes unless you finish it before we do. (In which case, you tell me how it goes!)

Find or Form an Herbal Group for Kids

Join or being a group of herbal moms and dads in your local area for herbal education – learning is more fun with friends! You’ll learn so much by learning and teaching in small, intimate groups. 

You don’t have know everything to gather like minded people around you and share what you know. Plus, you can experiment and make mistakes together. Keep it fun and keep it real!

• Also, a fun idea from Jill’s Home Remedies – Start and Herbal Club for Kids!!
• You may also be able to get some ideas from this article: How to Start a Homestead Book Club. It’s not as hard as it may sound to start your own group, I promise.

Herbal Board Game

LearningHerbs.com is a quality general resource for herbal information, but my favorite product they’ve produced has to be the Herb Fairies books! All my kids have read through these multiple times.

• I love how they teach about each herb in an engaging way, blending whimsy with fact, fiction with botany.

If I’m being honest, Learning Herbs actually has two of my favorite products; the Herb Fairies books and their board game called Wildcraft. We had to purchase two sets so that the cousins could play, too, when they visited.

It’s an easy, cooperative game with good graphics and not so many pieces you’ll lose them all as the children play it all over the house. I was immediately amazed at how much my kids enjoyed playing it and still do! Even visiting children with no background in herbs or even plants in general have a blast with it.

We were up in the mountains recently and my kids found several of the herbs used in Wildcraft; “Hey!” they’d say pointing, “That plant is an herb! I remember seeing it on our cards in Wildcraft!”  Ah, sweet rewards.

I may have to purchase another set because we’re loving ours into the ground we’ve played it so much!

We’ve used herbal flashcards before but Wildcraft is far more effective at teaching, in my opinion. However, herbal flashcards do well in emergency kits or the backpacks the kids take out foraging for quick reference.

• Herbal Academy has a useful set of herbal flashcards, if you’d like to check those out. You can also check out Etsy for many options from small artisans.

Herbal Magazine

We’ve subscribed to Herbal Roots Zine magazine by herbalist Kristine Brown and have really used and enjoyed it! This is a hand-crafted publication especially for children to teach them about herbs and healing plants. Each issue includes crossword puzzles, recipes, stories, illustrations, crafts and a whole host of other nifty stuff. 

It’s not cheap, FYI, but what we learned this year and the volume of information in each issue, I definitely got what I paid for. Especially since this is something on which I’m willing to spend a little money! The issue on cranberries inspired us to make these frozen foraged bird feeders, and they were so fun!

• Kristine has added a lot of learning resources to her shop over the years and each one might be of interest to your children. Be sure to check out her whole shop! She also has online classes which I’m really excited to explore but haven’t done so yet. If  you take one, please leave a comment and tell me what you thought!

Random Herby Things for Kids

Here’s an Introduction fo Herbs for Kids from Herbal Academy. This is a series of articles to help kids become acquainted with herbs.

I also wanted to toss in these fun ideas from Pistachio Project – she knows her herbs! Food and crafts are always pleasing and they’re a great way to make herbs accessible to children.

• Herbal Craft – Homemade Herbal Slime and Herbal Moon Sand – both so fun and tactile!
• Window Clings made from herbs and which can be eaten because of what they’re made from.
• Herbal Kool Aid Alternative- yay!

If you and the kids are new to herbs, get started with our short e-book, The Potted Herb. This book will get you growing herbs in pots this year regardless of where you live or how much space you have. It outlines a collection of well known herbs for culinary and wellness uses. We’ll teach you how to grow and use these wonderful plants – every child can grow an herb garden this year!

Did I forget an herbal resource that you love? Leave me a comment and let other readers know about it!

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