On the Farm!

For the past two weeks, we have been having a great time learning about our farm unit.  This is one of my favorites!  The children get so excited with this unit and we had a lot of fun!  We started with a book called "What Farm Animal" that gave clues to the different animals and the kids had to guess which animal we were talking about.  (The little book I sent home).  We also each had a puppet and sang the classic "Old MacDonald had a farm" song.  We talked about all kinds of farm happenings, from the animals and what they eat and what sounds they make, to what farmers do, to what vegetables are grown on the farm.  We even did a science experiment that showed that veggies need food and water just like us.  We put some celery in a cup with blue colored water, and watched the celery for a few days until the leaves of the celery turned blue. 

Here are some of the fun centers we did:

We made play dough farm friends.  They loved depicting what the animals were, and then counted them as they made more.  They made the noises of the farm animals as they made them, and even put them were they would live on the farm with pictures I had printed.  (Ex.  cows in the pasture, chickens in a coup). 

I got the above idea for a sensory center from a friend and am so glad I did because the kids loved it.  The beads they are playing with are called water beads and you find them in the floral section at a craft store.  They start out the size of a small bead, and grow to the size of a marble when you add water.  They have a smooth, wet texture. 

There were farm animals hidden in the beads and the kids found the farm animals and put them on the farm back where they belonged.

They did this over and over.  They couldn't get enough of these beads.  A lot of fun!

We talked about how chickens lay eggs......up to 7 a day and 300 per year.  The kids came to this center where "farmer Ben" dropped his eggs while collecting them and they all broke.  The kids helped farmer Ben put back together his eggs and put them in the corresponding carton as shown. 

The kids helped the farm animals make it back to the barn with these foam stamps.  The farm had no animals and so the kids stamped the animals on their papers until the farm animals were happily back home.

We learned about the letters 'H' and 'I'  these last two weeks.  For the letter 'H' we took our letter h and made it holey.  As the children punched their letter, they would say the sound that the letter makes.

For an art project we made animal masks.  They had the choice to choose between a dog, a pig, and a cow.  As you can see, the dog was a popular pick!

We also made baby chicks out of our foot print!  The kids would giggle as they stepped in the paint and liked their feet being "tickled" as we wiped them clean afterwards.

Puppets shows of course!!

We even had our own milking station where the kids could come learn how to milk a cow!!

Another fun activity that you can do at home with your kids is these magnetic letters.  Print some word strips, with or without pictures and have your children look for the letters to spell the words (and stick them to a fridge or a cookie sheet).  Then, help them name the letters and sound out the sounds.  I can't stand that infomercial that advertises the children reading at a very young age by looking at pictures of a thing, and then showing the word of that thing.  They are not reading here, they are memorizing.  They don't know what sound each letter really makes, they just know that everytime an elephant was shown, the long word elephant came after it.  We have to break down the words for our children for them to really understand reading.   Anyway, a great phonic activity that is super cheap. 

We talked about the numbers 5 and 6 these last two weeks, so for a math activity we learned about dice.  We talked about how they have 6 sides and the children rolled a dice, counted the number of dots for the side it landed on and found that number on their sheet.  Then they put a marker on that number and tried to fill their sheet. 

Another fun math center that we did was our "That's nuts!" sorting center.  We used chop sticks to count and sort peanuts and acorns.  The kids did great with the chopsticks (although my sweet husband made it a little easier for them by attatching the two together) and revisited this station a lot to use the chopsticks. 

The Mon.-Wed. (Tues.-Thurs. had a day off with the family) class also did corn painting for an art project. 

These little piglets are ready to go to the farm!!  Don't forget.  Monday the 18th or Tuesday the 19th are the field trip days.  Meet at my house at 9:20 or the farm at 9:50 AM. 

We have now learned the letters A-I.  Please continue to work on these letters with your children.  We have even started building words such as dig, pig, bag, and big!

The songs we did are "Old Macdonald" and "I'm a mean old witch with a hat".  You can find the lyrics for it here.  It is the second song down.  At the end, the children all yell "Boo!"

See you soon for our field trip!!