Last month, we did a two week Farm Unit Study. It was easy to prepare for and the kids really enjoyed it. I was able to find ways to incorporate math, science, social studies, language arts, sensory, music, and reading into this unit.
For our farm sensory bin, I used a base of popcorn seeds and also dry noodles I bought in a bulk bin (the kind you would use for chicken noodle soup) that I thought looked a lot like hay. I added some farm animals: cow, horse, rooster, chicken, lamb, pigs, geese, peacock, donkey, as well as three trees and a farmer carrying a cow. I also added a rubber hen and a squishy pig.
I filled the kids’ workboxes with lots of fun hands-on Farm activities. I included a Barnyard Friends puzzle and a Ravensburger Look & Find Farm puzzle. There were also Farm Lacing Cards, 1-2-3 Farmyard! (Moorific Math Game), Wild Horses game, as well as some printed activities. The Wild Horses game was by far the winner in terms of popularity. It got played with multiple times a day regardless of whose bin it was in that particular day. Everyone took turns playing even in the evenings.
I used worksheets that I printed from several places. My favourites were the Beginning Sounds Match (free printable from Kindergarten Stars) and the farm spelling words from the On the Farm printable pack from 2 Teaching Mommies. I put the spelling sheets with some letters and the kids matched them up.
Every day during our Farm study, the kids each did one of the Farm Creative Writing Prompt sheets from 123 Homeschool 4 Me. I really liked that the prompts were open-ended and my early writers could just write a short sentence and my more confident writers could add description and write a paragraph.
We talked about different farm animals, the different types of farms and what work is like on a farm. We talked about how farming is where most of our food comes from and we made butter by shaking cream in a container until it turned into butter.
We sang Old MacDonald and Farmer in the Dell. With our reading, I realized that two of our all-time favourite books are farm-related so we read them again and added in a new book as well. Our well worn copy of The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown was read a few times. By now, I have it memorized which is a very good thing since it is so worn that one of the last pages cannot be made out anymore!
Click, Clack Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin is still funny after all this time! It’s just such a cute book! We’ve done some activities to correspond with the book in the past including some printables but this time we just read it (well, we may have read it more than once that day since we like it so much!).
Of course, what Farm unit would be complete without a visit to an actual farm? We were able to go to 2 farms during our unit study. One was a Hutterite colony (more on that in a post of its own) where they grow vegetables for market and raise chickens for one of the large poultry companies and the other was a friends’ farm where they have pigs, cows and buffalo.
You can find other ideas for a farm unit study on my Farm Pinterest Board.
For this winter themed tray, I added white feathers, silver 
This is a lot less than I usually include in a sensory bin or tray, so I’ve been surprised at how much the kids have enjoyed playing with it and at the scope of their imaginations. They have made the feathers into clouds, the faux fur into a snow hill, the jingle bells into tobogganers! They have threaded the jingle bells onto the feathers, have created patterns with the feathers, have hidden the “W” beneath layers of fluff…they have not tired of this activity yet.
It was very open-ended so they added leaves they made out of paper, string, foam stickers, and paper folding. They used bingo dabbers, crayons, pens, pencil crayons, and markers to add their personal touches.
The last simple activity we made was to cut out things that the girls had coloured in from coloring books and attach them to paper using raised double sided tape. The kids then wrote on the paper what they were thankful for.
I set up a simple backyard obstacle course for the kids using what we had around. I got the kids to rake leaves so that I could make a big pile of leaves for them to jump into at the end. I used branches to create a narrow pathway, set up chairs, a slide, hula hoops, a log and a longboard for them to hop over, two balls for them to kick, and I used what was already set up (the climbing wall and the merry-go-round) as part of the course as well.
The kids had to go up the climbing wall and down the stairs on the other side, over to the merry-go-round where they had to go around 5 times, then kick one of the soccer balls, up and over the two back to back chairs, a two footed hop over the log and then over the longboard, through the narrow path between the laid out branches, one foot in each hula hoop to run through, up the slide, and jump off into the pile of leaves. They then had to retrieve the soccer ball and replace it for the next person. Jumping in the leaves was their favourite part!