Farm Play

The girls are interested in farm animals.  

The twins are beginning to sign cow and say 'moo'.

 I made a felt mat for the floor to encourage that language.

It was simple to make with just felt and a glue gun.

I did use blue drawer liner for the pond.

 A problem that we encountered was that it's slippery.

When the twins crawled on top of it, it would scrunch up.

We laid a blanket underneath and it helped a bit.

 Here are the cousins looking at a cow and the big cousin is signing it.

 The barns are made from cardboard boxes that I painted then covered with modge podge so the paint wouldn't come off on their hands.

The animals I found at the dollar store.

They are from wooden inlay puzzles.

 The twins soon flipped the boxes over and put the animals inside.

Then dumped them out and did it again.

The older one thought it made a great blanket.

Chicks to the Farm

Our chicks are a week old so time to move them to the farm.

This year we were able to take them ourselves.

We are fortunate to have a very supportive Parent Advisory Council that paid for a bus

for us to travel on.

The chicks rode in the front seat all the way to Clea's place

where Clea explained that the chicks would still live inside 

for a while longer.

We started with a tour of two chicken coops,

first was the summer coop that had fresh plants growing.

The big chickens will move into that coop soon.

Meantime they are still in the winter coop.

These chickens are the ones that we hatched last year.

Seeing them gave us an idea of what this year's chicks will grow up to look like.

Next we went and visited the cows.

They were across the field so Clea told us to call them.

We yelled 'Cow, cow, here cow' and they came running.

They are very friendly and like to eat grass.

Next we met Clea's mom who is a Master Beekeeper.

She was outfitted to open a hive.

First she explained that the bottom two boxes are the bees home so they don't 

take the honey from them.

 

She lifted out one of the frames and we could see the bees on it.

She picked one that the honey was capped and brushed the bees off.

We got to taste it.  Yum!

Clea also taught us the difference between honey bees and wasps,

as well as mason bees.

Finally we settled on the grass for a snack and story

before climbing back on the bus for the ride back to school.

Chicken Coop Research

Our latest project - converting our cardboard fire truck into a house for chickens.

For the past week the children have been asked what we would need to do to this box

to make it into a chicken coop.

This morning we visited a local farm to have a first hand look

at a chicken house.

This is what we learned.

The first thing we noticed, other than chickens, was the feeder.

We saw wooden sticks hanging from the wall

for the chickens to perch on.

We saw a group of nesting boxes.

Each of them had a chicken in them.

Shannon, the farmer, showed us how to check under the chickens for eggs.

We found one.

Shannon keeps a basket handy in the coop to collect the eggs.

We saw a small entry with a drop door in the back of the coop

for the chickens to go into a fenced yard.

Then we got to feed the chickens.

We went back in the barn, out of the rain, to record what we saw.

The first thing we drew was the shape of the building,

the children are showing me the shape of the roof

by forming a peak with their hands.

As the children recalled what they saw I made a list.

This is now our plans for what we will need to do back at school.

To finish our tour we were going to make nests but it was quite rainy

so I had made paper bag nests for each child.

In the nest was a plastic egg with a chick inside.

We practiced our poem "Five Eggs".

This afternoon, at school, I set up our documentation

to help us remember what we want to do.

Made a peaked roof on the box and set up for painting.