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DIY Terrariums: Gorgeous as Gifts or For Your Own Home

All of my kids had incredible teachers this year! I wanted to help the kids come up with a thank you gift they could make for their teachers that would be meaningful for both them and the teacher. These DIY terrariums were easy to make, and they were a gift my kids adored making and giving to their teachers!

These DIY terrariums are gorgeous! They are wonderful as gifts or to keep as decoration in your own home.

Update:We kept one terrarium for ourselves. Our terrarium thrived for well over a year until we let it get too cold one night.

My kids share my fascination with terrariums, particularly DIY terrariums. We admire photos of them online all the time! I had looked into making several different types of terrariums in the past, but this was our first time actually completing this project!

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DIY Terrariums: Gorgeous as Gifts or For Your Own Home

Materials for a simple DIY terrarium

Sourcing the materials for a terrarium felt incredibly intimidating to me as a beginner. The two terrarium kits I bought included everything shown above plus the glass “bubbles”, hanging twine, a water atomizer (little spray bottle), and the live air plants. Air plants are pretty great terrarium plants, because they don’t have roots to worry about. The kits I bought were similar to this air plant terrarium kit; you can also source the glass terrariums, bromeliads , preserved moss, vermiculite, perlite, dried lichen, twine, and rocks separately.

DIY terrariums kids can make to give as gorgeous teacher gifts

My kids have enough experience with crafting that I could trust even three-year-old Anna with a glass bubble. As always, they were closely supervised, and we had a talk before starting about how fragile the bubbles were.

DIY terrarium

Each child put a lot of thought into what they wanted to include in their terrarium! We had plenty of materials for them to design to their hearts’ delight, with preserved moss, vermiculite, perlite, dried lichen, twine, and rocks to spare. We are still deciding how to use the leftovers – fortunately they are all non-perishable, so we can take our time deciding what to do.

LOVE the air plant in this DIY terrarium!


The kids decorated these treat boxes and used wood shavings that had come in our kits as padding to deliver their terrariums to their teachers.

If you OR your kids have ever wanted to give DIY terrariums a go, bromeliad terrariums are a fabulous place to start! Do you have any recommendations as to what we should do with the leftover materials?

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MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.

7 thoughts on “DIY Terrariums: Gorgeous as Gifts or For Your Own Home”

  1. Fairy houses! That’s on my kids’ MUST DO list ever since we saw the gnomist documentary (I think that was the name).

    I think we might make some for the grandparents, my kids’ would love to do this.

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