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!).
We also read Cock-a-Doodle-Doo: Barnyard Hullabaloo! which I had heard about and thought it would go really well with our unit. It is a collection of barnyard poems by Giles Andreae. My kids still enjoy rhythmic rhyming type of prose so they wanted me to read it again and again.
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.
I love this! you are so creative – my kids would love that sensory bin.