Week 14 Farm Animals

Learning about farm animals can be fun, especially if you can visit a farm with animals.  Our neighbor raises chickens and my daughter gets to feed them when we go visit her.
Objectives:
Learn which animals live on a farm, learn what their jobs are, learn where our foods come from.


We read Chickens on the Family Farm, Find It on the Farm, and Watch Me Grow Farm Animals.  I don't know what books your library will have available, but section 636 is the place to look. Find It on the Farm was neat because it talked about all the different animals that could be found.  It also has a look and find section, which really interests my daughter.

We also have many toddler books with farm animals.  It's very important to me to include my middle child in our schooling.  Fostering a love of learning is important, so while preschool is taking place with my oldest child I work to include my middle child.  We worked on animal noises with my toddler.

We sang "Old McDonald" and spent some time pretending to be animals. We role played with our fisher price barn to talk about what animals do on the farm.  For example, we talked about sheep dogs rounding up sheep; then we role played that. We talked about pigs rolling in the mud, and then we played with the pig in the mud.

We usually save our discussions about where our food comes from for dinner time.  While eating our food we discuss where things come from.  Our vegetables come from the garden or the grocery store.  Our chicken comes from chickens on a farm.  Our bacon, ham, and sausage all come from pigs. (She declared last week that we should get a pig so we can have bacon more often.)  And our fruits come from trees and grocery stores. Etc.  Some children would get grossed out by similar conversations, but our daughter takes it at face value and learns where her food comes from.  A small tangent - when she was just two we watched Nemo for the first time.  Afterwards, we were having fish for dinner.  While we were eating my husband mentioned that Nemo is also a fish, that we were eating Nemo.  I thought it would turn her from fish, but to my surprise she seemed to like fish way better. Random.

We also introduced the vowel digraph "ar" while we talked about farms and barns. You can see our letter card in the picture above.  We are working a mixed phonics approach to reading.  We are combining site words with letter sounds to teach decoding and shortly reading.

We also worked on our numbers 20-23 by rolling out snakes with play dough and shaping them into numbers. It was such a simple activity, but highly effective for my daughter to better recognize the twenties.