The Life of a Running Momma: Weekly Learning Theme: Farm

I was so excited going into our learning theme about farms and farm animals. I had so many ideas on activities to do and the theme didn't disappoint. We had a blast with it. I'm loving that Elise is able to do so much more with us. She enjoys the sensory bins and can participate in lots of activities. I enjoy doing things all three of us so much! It's also fun to give her a themed activity to work on while Carter and I do something more challenging.

Listed below are the objectives I am focusing on for the themed weeks. I have revised our objectives to really hone in and focus on specific skills Carter will need to master before kindergarten and are appropriate to his age and development right now. I plan to continue to implement activities to practice and reinforce our previous objectives while putting more emphasis on our new objectives. Some of them won't necessarily be targeted with specific activities during our weeks, but I wanted to list them to help me remember to practice them continually. I'm also adding in a section for Elise now that she is a year old. I don't considers her bullet points objectives, they are experiences I want to make sure to expose her to frequently. Her experiences are listed below Carter as bullet points rather than numbers.

The highlighted objectives below are ones Carter received exposure to during our theme this week:

Begin to organize and focus on writing. (Dictate stories, plan out a story, draw pictures and scribbles to create a book).

Understand same and different.

Accurately tell stories as well as retell the story from a book.

Use age appropriate scissors. (I'm moving on to looking for a thumb and forefinger grasp with writing tools and holding scissors appropriately)
Develop a better understanding of time (for example, be able to describe when things happen using morning, afternoon, night)

Group objects based on a category (sort by defining feature).

Count with one-to-one correspondence, begin to identify numerals, being to use ordinal numbers (first, second, last).

Experiences Elise was exposed to during our theme this week are highlighted below:

Pretend play/Imitate the behaviors of others.
Begin to identify and point at body parts. (Right now I just want to say body parts aloud to her frequently and point them out on myself)
Group based on simple characteristics. (This is something I will do while talking aloud and allowing her to feel objects)
Fill and empty containers.
Begin to hold writing tools and scribble spontaneously.
Identify sounds around her. (Point out sounds and ask her what is making the sound).

Activities/Movement:

My plan for our sensory bin was to use corn from our fall learning theme as a base with farm toys and animals thrown in. I pulled out the corn and there were bugs all in it so we had to toss it and used rice instead. We got a bucket of farm animals at Wal-Mart and then I added one of Carter's tractors and a building from his train set that looked like a barn. Both kids loved playing with it. While playing with it, Carter sorted the animals based on what they were. Then he counted how many we had of each animal and placed the numeral with them to practice with numbers.

Putting numbers with the sets of animals.
We had lots of toys that fit into our farm animal theme. I was so excited to pull them all out along with all the farm and tractor books we have. Then I made a special area in the living room with all our farm themed toys. I loved that it was right by the rocking chair so Carter could pick a book and read it in his chair. It was also in plain sight so Elise was always going over to grab a toy to play with. Carter ended up putting his puzzle together pretty much daily.

Carter reading a farm book with all of our farm toys displayed nearby.
My parents got Carter a book with farm animal sounds when he was little. You push the animal and it makes it's sound. Carter picked up on the fact that I was really talking about animal sounds with Elise and wanted to read it to her. It was so cute to hear him tell Elise the animal's name and then ask her what sound it made before pushing on the animal. She loved it!
Carter had a giant farm floor puzzle from his Great Uncle Kelly and Mary and Elise had a simple wooden farm animal puzzle from her Oma and Opa. At first Carter thought the big floor puzzle was too hard for him. I talked him into trying it with me and the next day he was already completing it all on his own! Elise cracked me up, just shoving her pieces willy nilly on the board as to be expected. It was great fine motor practice for her to pick the pieces up out of their slots, hold them, and then set them back down on the board.

Notice the barn piece placed in the pig's slot and sideways. It was so cute to see Elise put the pieces on the board.

Trying to put the lamb on upside-down.

Putting in the last piece of his farm floor puzzle.

Thomas got one of the kids a farm animal sound toy for a present, I can't remember which one though. Elise enjoyed pulling the lever down so the middle piece would spin and then tell the animal's name and sound. She also liked trying to grab the middle piece as it was spinning.
I found a "Who Am I?" farm animal book for free online here. Carter and I read the book together, guessing each animal. Then Carter drew his favorite farm animal in the back of the book on the empty page. Later we talked about farm animals that weren't in the book and described them in a few different ways like the book had described the animals. I pulled animal figurines out of our sensory bin and he chose 3 of them to write about. He chose 2 sentences to describe each of them and then added the sound they make. On the page that told the animal he drew a cow with some help. He made the circles for the body and head and then drew legs. Then he wanted me to make the spots and draw an udder. On the other 2 animals he wanted me to lay the figurine down on the page and trace it so I did.

Reading through the book and guessing the animals.

Drawing his favorite farm animal, a rooster.

The book pages Carter added to the book.

We played farm animal bowling and also used the animal bowling pins in various different ways. Carter identified each animal by name and shared the sound it makes. We also talked about what color each of the animals was and would use the color and animal name to describe them as we played, saying "pink pig, orange chicken, etc". Then we put the animals in order based on the number written on their bellies. We counted them and I told Carter each number represented the total number of animals. Then I had him trace the numbers on each animal's belly as I said the number and he told me the number. After the first day we played with the animals, Carter was able to identify the numbers 1, 2, and 3. We've worked on them a little bit, but that was the first time we sat down and really worked on identifying them. We also talked about the animals' ears and how they were same and different. Then we talked about which ears were biggest and which were smallest, sorting the animals into small ears and big ears.

Counting the bowling pins and pointing out the numbers.

Bowling with his body.

Tracing the number 2 on the dog's belly.

Elise bowling.

I printed animal cards I found online here. They were supposed to be for a Bingo game, but I just printed the calling cards twice to make it into a memory game. I had them sitting out to play a game with. Carter found them and started talking about the animals on them, describing what they looked like, what their names were, and what sound they made. Then we discussed similarities and differences between the different animals. I was impressed when Carter started talking about whether the babies were born from eggs or their mommies, which led into discussing whether they were mammals or birds. The next time we played with them, Carter matched the pictures that went together. Then we counted how many we had of each animal and how many cards we had all together. After we'd played with them a few times, I decided to go back and print the Bingo cards to go with them. Carter had never played Bingo before and I thought it would be fun. For a little twist and for some fine motor practice, we picked off a little piece of Play Doh and rolled it into a ball to cover the animals on our cards. I'd pull out an animal and make it's noise. Carter would tell me what animal he was looking for and then cover it on his Bingo card. We played once and he wasn't interested in playing again.

Checking out the animals and talking about them.

Matching the animals.

Playing farm animal memory.

Covering animals on his Bingo card.

He was really excited about his Bingo!

We also played with a different set of farm animal cards. We used them to discuss animal similarities and differences. Carter decided he wanted to sort them based on whether they had 2 legs or 4 legs. Then I cut each animal card in half and we mix and matched the cards to make up silly animals. Carter would make up a name and sound for the new animal we had made and then make up a story about it. Most were really strange names like blug. Then we went through and matched the animals back up to make the original animal.
At Gigi and Papa's house the kids played with a tractor with a farmer and animals that go with it. As you put the animals in a spot in the tractor they make their sounds. Elise was quite intrigued with it.

Carter has quite a few toy tractors. We got them all out and counted them. Then we compared them. Carter pointed out that they were all the same color and they all had four wheels, but they were different sizes and two of them had trailers attached to the back. I had him look at the back of the tractors and we noticed some of them had triangles on the back for slow moving vehicles. We also noticed some of them had hitches on the back and others didn't. Each time we noticed something that was different about the tractors we would count to see how many had that attribute and how many didn't. While Carter was playing with his tractors he made patterns with them. He chose to do it all on his own while I was making dinner and I was impressed. He showed me one pattern was big, small, big, small and then the other was close up, far away, close up, far away because he drove every other tractor farther away from him on the table.

Looking at and comparing his tractors.
For some fun while we were playing Play Doh, I stuck farm animal figurines down into the Play Doh so Elise could work on fine motor skills by pulling them out of the Play Doh. Carter saw us doing that and decided to make farm animal footprints in the Play Doh by sticking their feet down into the Play Doh.
Carter really wanted me to hide eggs for him to find so I put a farm animal twist on it. I put farm animal cards in the Easter egg. When Carter found an egg, he'd open it up to find an animal card. We then acted out the animal with sounds and movements. Elise played along, mimicking us. She even yelled hee haw and ran around. Carter's favorites were doing donkey kicks and galloping like a horse. We played this game over and over all week.

We were moving around so much I couldn't get a good picture.
Elise and I had some fun one day when she woke up from her nap before Carter. I showed her how to put farm animals from our sensory bin into the sections of an egg carton. As she picked up an animal I would tell her it's name and the sound it made. Then she would place the animal in an empty spot in the egg carton. When she had it filled, we'd dump all the animals out and start again. It was so much fun to watch her work!

She saw me taking a picture and said, "cheese"!

Putting animals in the egg carton.
I wanted to make tangram farm animals because Carter loves working with his tangram set so much. I used to play around and make up my own animals when I first learned about tangram sets in college, but now I opt for finding already made solutions online. The website I like the most has different categories which makes finding just what I want super easy. I found all the tangram farm animals we used here then I just copied and pasted them into a Word Document and resized them so the shapes were the right size for our tangram set. Every time Carter puts together the tangram pieces, I am amazed at his ability to manipulate the shapes, turning them and positioning them to make them fit in the correct place.

Craft:

I had seen various different tractor footprint crafts and farm animal crafts on pinterest. We settled on a footprint tractor using Carter's foot and a horse using Elise's hand. Then we added some chicks using Carter's thumbprint. Carter was so excited to make the tractor and thanked me multiple times for drawing around his footprint to make it into a tractor. It was so cute. I loved how it turned out!

Carter accidentally knocked his friend's Gatorade over and it spilled on our picture so I cut out the unaffected section and glued it to blue paper. I actually liked it better that way!

I showed Carter some other farm animals we could make and he chose a pig. I didn't look at the actual website that I saw on pinterest, I just looked at the picture. After we had done the handprints and I was drawing to turn them into pigs, I realized I shouldn't have put paint on their thumbs so I had a place to draw the pig head, but went with it.

We used paper plates to make some different farm animal masks. Carter helped me cut out pieces from construction paper and colored the plate to make the pig. Then he wanted to move on to drawing and asked me to finish the masks, so I did. While Carter and I worked on the masks, Elise scribbled and drew with markers. It was so cute to watch her work really hard. Carter and I played with the masks, pretending we were different farm animals. We could only play with them when Elise wasn't around because she would rip them apart.

Carter working on a mask while Elise colored.

Cutting out the pig's nose and ears.

Carter showing Elise his mask.

Elise working hard on her picture.

I had planned for Carter to spell out his name using corn kernels on his name written out on paper. Since we didn't have corn kernels, I decided to use cotton balls to spell out his name while Elise glued cotton balls onto an outline of a sheep. It was good work for Carter to stretch out the cotton balls in order to form the shapes better. It was a little tricky for him, but he did great. When he was finished I let him play and he glued together a tower of cotton balls. Elise wasn't too thrilled about getting glue on her fingers and accidentally getting cotton stuck to her fingers. She loved ripping apart cotton balls though.

Making his name out of cotton balls.

Special Snack:

We made homemade butter which was a lot of fun. We used a small jelly jar my Aunt Sue had given us homemade jelly in. I filled it half full with heavy whipping cream and we shook it like crazy. As we shook it we sang. I made up songs, telling Carter which direction to shake. I'd sing, "Shake it up high, shake it up low, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it to and fro." He loved following the directions in the song as he shook. I also sang "Shake it to the left, shake it to the right, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it out of sight." He loved hiding it behind his back. After a while he was over that so he wanted to guess how many more minutes until it turned into butter. He'd guess, we'd set a timer, and then we'd check the butter to see if it was solid yet. I also pulled up Shake It by Metro Station to listen to. Elise loved dancing to it as Carter shook the jar. When the butter was firm I drained off the remaining liquid and stirred in a little salt. Then we tasted it on a saltine cracker. Each of us had 2 crackers with butter and then saved the rest for Ty. The first thing Carter told Ty when he got home was, "We have a surprise for you in the fridge!" I'm sure Ty was a little disappointed it was just butter.

Carter shaking the butter.

Shaking it high.

Trying out our butter on some crackers.

Elise really liked it!
We played a game in the make believe section with Easter eggs and Carter really wanted me to fill the eggs with snacks for him. So on our run that day I filled the eggs with snacks and put them in his egg carton. He loved shaking the eggs, guessing what was in them, and opening them to eat his snack. I snuck a tootsie roll from a package Uncie J gave us into a couple eggs and Carter loved that. It was so cute to listen to him open the eggs and watch him get excited as I peeked in at him during our run.

Having a blast searching through his eggs for snacks.

Make Believe:

I showed Carter a video on Youtube of a farmer milking a cow by hand and then one milking a cow with a machine. Carter thought it was pretty neat. Then I mixed water and a little bit of flour to look like milk. I put the "milk" in a rubber glove I had poked holes in the finger parts and let him pretend to milk a cow into his sensory bin.

I set up a pretend chicken coop with blankets as nests for the chickens. Then I filled them with Easter eggs and put the chicken from our farm animal bowling set on top. Elise and Carter pretended to be farmers and, Carter even wore his tractor hat to fit the part, collected eggs from the nests. When Carter was finished he counted the eggs in his carton and realized he had collected 12 eggs. He thought it was hilarious when he counted Elise's eggs and she had only collected 3 eggs.

Carter saw me taking a picture and told Elise to cheese.

Counting his eggs.
It worked out great that Cow Appreciation Day at Chick Fil A fell during this learning theme. We all dressed as cows for a free meal. Carter liked being dressed like a cow and pretending to be a cow. It worked out really well because I had dressed as a cow for Halloween when I was pregnant with Carter so I already had a tail, udder, ears, and some white felt spots. Then I just cut some spots out of black construction paper for Carter's shirt.

Elise was not pleased to be wearing a headband, but her cow ears were so cute!

Songs:

We sang Five Little Ducks while acting it out with rubber ducks. We had a number puzzle with large rubber numbers. As we sang, we put the number that represented the total number of ducks that came back along with the ducks. When we were done singing, we filled a sensory bin with water and added the ducks and numbers for Carter to play with. I was playing beside him with Elise and noticed he was singing the song and retelling it with the ducks just like we had done together. It was so cute!

Playing in his Five Little Ducks sensory bin.

We read The Farmer in the Dell by Steve Simpson and then sang The Farmer in the Dell over and over. Carter really enjoyed the song. We also sang it having different farm animals take each other, filling in the names with something different. We also listened to Old MacDonald and The Animal Sounds Song on Youtube. We also sang Old MacDonald quite a bit during the week.

We sang a fun farm song that I heard somewhere, but don't remember where. It went like this:

Dogs at the farm go woof, woof, woof.

Chickens at the farm go cluck, cluck, cluck.

We kept singing adding in different animal names and their sounds.

Field Trip/Interactive Experience:

There was a farm not too far away that hosts a special storytime each Saturday in July so we headed out to the farm. The animal for the day was cow, so we listened to a couple cow books. Then we made a cow craft which was a paper plate mask. Next the kids got to feed the cow and then had the chance to go for a "ride" on the cow. They just sat on top of the cow. After the program we got to walk around the farm to see all the different animals they had. Elise loved the horse and wanted it to come closer... Until it did. Then she was terrified and clung to me, trying to swing away from the horse. There was also a funny moment when the bull got upset that all the cows got to go into the pasture and he didn't. He came charging at the gate where we were standing, bellowing with anger. Carter just straight up took off running. By the time I had turned around he was halfway across the field. It was hilarious! When we got home I had Carter write about his favorite part and he said it was riding the cow.

Posing with his cow mask.

Sitting on the cow.

Elise wanting to see the horse.

Which terrified her once it came over.

Carter drawing a picture of himself riding the cow. He looked off his earlier picture to help him.