Learn About Patience Through Bonsai: Printables for Kids

We're all familiar with the old saying, "good things come to those who wait". The art of growing and tending to bonsai is an incredible lesson in patience. Bonsai is a Japanese version of the traditional Chinese art of penzai. Essentially, it is an ancient practice of growing miniature trees which are carefully made to mimic actual real life-sized trees in the wild.

The key to successfully raising a bonsai tree is patience. Many award winning bonsai plants are over 100 years old. Some are over 800 years old! The reason why looking after bonsai requires a lot of patience is because most of them take very long to grow. Results of your efforts will take time and speeding up the process may end up hurting the plant. Bonsai masters in Japan understand that they may never get to see the full glory of many of their bonsai plant seedlings... and that's okay as they have enjoyed those from the generations before them.

This creative printable worksheet pack is an exercise to reflect about the importance of patience for children. Let's get to it!

Printable & Activity Objectives

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Age: 6 to 9 year olds, Activity Time: On-going, Items Needed: Colouring pencils

In this activity, your child will learn the ancient Japanese living art form called bonsai and through that gain a deeper understanding of the importance of patience in our lives. They will also be charting acts of patience in their daily lives and also design a little printable bonsai tree of their own.

It will help your child or student:

Learn to appreciate the importance of patience, hard work and dedication in achieving mastery of anything. They will learn to understand that immediate results is not always possible and rushing can sometimes hurt the outcome.
Develop their artistic and design skills through the creation of their own unique bonsai plant artwork.

Let's learn more about bonsai!

Classroom Resources

Simple steps to start:

Research and find out more about the traditional art of bonsai. Here is an insightful video about a forth generation bonsai master's dedication to preserving this ancient living art form:

Here's a great summary video featuring the history and basics of what bonsai is all about:

Here's a video about how to make a beautiful bonsai tree from a starter kit. Important: The video contains the use of sharp gardening tools. Children should never use sharp tools unsupervised.

Talk to your child about patience and what are the examples of acts of patience. Here's a funny video about self-regulation i.e. staying calm and resisting impulses, featuring the lovable Cookie Monster!