We started off talking about the different vehicles used on the farm. We watched a video of Tractor Tom's Busy Day, and all the things tractors help farmers to do. We put together a tractor puzzle, then wrote where our tractor was going once it was completed. The kids had such fun painting with tractors! They dipped their tractors in green paint, and then rolled them across their paper to see the tracks the tractor made. Our hands got super messy, but we didn't care! We worked on a tractor maze, and different tractor patterns.
Next we talked about the different chores on the farm. We read Bumpety Bump by Pat Hitchens and talked about all the different kinds of fruits and vegetables the little boy helped his grandpa pick at the farm. We painted barns that we put together on a different day. The children enjoyed seeing what colours they could create when they mixed red, blue, and yellow together in different ways. A chicken came to preschool the night before and laid eggs all around the room, which the children had to find. Once we found all the eggs, we counted all the eggs we found and what we use eggs for. We also practiced milking a cow. We poked holes in a plastic glove and then filled it with water and strung it across our sensory bin with a bucket underneath the catch the "milk". The kids thought it was lots of fun to squeeze the glove and make the milk come out. The best part of our lesson was making butter! We put whipping cream into baby food jars, and shook them until our cream turned into butter. It took a TON of shaking! But eventually it turned to butter and the boys were able to take it home to share.
We talked about pigs and sheep. We talked about what they had in common, and what was different about them. We also talked about what they give us to eat, as well as what we get from other farm animals. We discussed how pigs need mud on them to prevent them from getting sun burnt and made our own muddy pigs by cutting brown foam and gluing it onto our pigs. We learned a little bit about shapes, by matching different shaped piggy noses to the write pig. And we made beautiful rainbow sheep by gluing pom poms onto some sheep.
Cows and chickens were our next topic. We read "The Little Red Hen", and talked about all the hard work she put into making her bread, and how no one wanted to help her make the bread but everyone wanted to help her eat it. We talked about the life cycle of an egg, and watched a video of baby chick hatching out of the egg. This was followed by some very interesting play dough play, as the children played with little plastic farm animals in the play dough. They would cover the animal in play dough, make another animal sit on the covered animal, then the animal would hatch! We milked cows again and made paper plate cows to take home. We also read "Brown Cow, Brown Cow What do You See?" (a variation of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?") which the children were able to take home to colour their own copies. We added some animals to measure into our block area too!
Next we learned about ducks. We read "Duck on a Bike", and the kids thought it was pretty funny to see the duck ride the bike, and all the farm animals join him. We learned a new song called "6 Little Ducks", and had fun pretending to be the little duck with the feather on his back. We learned that ducks lay eggs just like chickens do, and re-watched the video of a chick hatching. We played animal charades and had our friends guess which animal we were by making the animals' noise. We also sung our favourite song "Do As I'm Doing", and acted like different animals while we sang.
To end our theme we read Mrs. Wishy Washy's Farm and learned a new song called "Wishy Washy Woman". The kids had a lot of fun acting out the different ways Mrs. Washy did chores, and were pretty tired by the end of the song. We painted animal tracks using little plastic farm animals. Some children got right into it and had their animals roll in the paint before putting them on the paper, and others were pretty concerned about not getting too messy. We played with home-made mud in the Sensory Centre with some poor animals stuck in the mud. Thankfully they were able to wash off the animals! We also covered animals in "mud" (play dough). It was very interesting to listen and hear what stories the children would come up with while they played with the play dough! Some animals were bad and sent to the mud as punishment, others had escaped and fallen into the mud. Many, many different ideas came out of our play dough play.
