Investigating Farms

What is a farm?  What or who lives on a farm?  What does a barn look like?  Those are a few questions that have been going around the classroom the past week and a half.
   
These questions were prompted over several years of hearing parents ask me to arrange a field trip to a farm.  I’ve heard from the parents and seen the children play with the barn and farm animals and have finally found a farm that has a variety of animals and willing to let us come for a visit.
       
To begin our investigation I set up this invitation to play with farm animals
                                          in a barn.
         
I wanted to see where their interests really lie.  Is it in the building or the
                                       animals or both.

It is definitely the animals.  We started singing ‘Old MacDonald’s Farm” and the toddlers’ faces light up when you make animal sounds.  Even the older children
                                     enjoy that song.
          
If we are going to focus on farm animals we will need a home for them so I
                      asked the children to design a barn. 
         
      The books were available for research and inspiration.
     
The question prompts were for the grown ups to ask, which I did as
                                    I sat with a few.
 
     Next week we’ll build our barn and focus more on animals.
          We also have our field trip to the farm on Tuesday.

Outdoor ABC Hunt

                   
This morning we spent a bit of time outside looking for a missing alphabet.
   
                        
I saw this idea at Fantastic and Fun Learning and adapted it to work for our centre.  I hid magnetic letters, A-Z, around our playground before we went outside.
          
The children were to quick to run around the play structure searching and
                                        finding letters.
                   
      As they found letters they added them to our alphabet line. 
        Matching the letters then running back to look for more.
    
The activity provided an opportunity to introduce letters and to reinforce
                        letters in each child’s name.
                       
Another benefit of printing the letters on the ground for the children
         to match was to make sure we found all the letters.

Hammering Inside and Outside

               
   Last week I provided hammers and golf tees for the children,
 
                     knowing that they love this activity.
  
    We hammered into paper to make holes, sometimes drawing a design
                                      or name first.
 
            
Then when they finished, if they were interested, they lifted it up towards the light
          
                                  and could see through it.

We have tried hammering golf tees into paper, pumpkins and styrofoam so I thought why not take it outside and let them hammer into the ground.
             
             The grass makes a suitable canvas for hammering.
       
Although the real challenge is getting the tee out of the ground if they
                                happen to hammer it deep.
          
                   How else can we extend hammer play?

Grumpy Bird ~ StoryMob

             This week our community performed a second StoryMob. 
We decided to do it on Raise-a-Reader day to help promote literacy in
                                      our community.
                  
We chose the book Grumpy Bird by Jeremy Tankard because he was the guest author/illustrator at our regional library summer reading program.  We offered a few pre-mob activities leading up to the event.
              
A story time in a local park was a good opportunity to introduce the book to
                          families who weren’t familiar with it.
             
                   
          We practiced copying Grumpy Bird as we walked around the park.

                       
        
Also we had a few days where families could attend events to make animal masks.  Our local art gallery opened on a Saturday to run a mask making day too.
      
       The day of the event started with building a nest for Grumpy Bird.
        
  We gathered our material in front of the art gallery and twisted grapevines
          together to make a circle.  Then we used bamboo to fill it in.
      
  The gallery provided some softer material to line the nest making it
                       comfortable for lots of birds to gather.

  Once all our main characters were assembled we started the story.
                          Bird wakes up grumpy.
     Too grumpy to eat, play and even fly so he goes for a walk.
As he walks he passes some of his friends and they decide to walk along with
                                        him.  
 
A young girl, of 8 , painted the above posters to put in business windows.  They provided the narration of the story and some advertisement leading up to our
                                                  event.
   
We continued around the city block meeting all the characters in the story
                           making our mob grow larger.
          
All the characters followed Grumpy Bird and copied his actions which cheered
                                 Bird until he was happy.
                    
We flew back to the nest to have a snack of worms (gummy, of course).
       
    It was so much fun to share a terrific story with so many people.