Posted by Nicole Carney on Apr 18, 2012 in Activities for Spelling, Awesome iPad Apps, Literacy Activities, Math Activities, Painting, Picture Book Activities, Spring Crafts and Activities | 0 comments

M loves to explore, especially around Grandpa’s farm. He is fascinated by the cattle, the wide open space, and the rumbling machinery. With this in mind, I though it would be fun to focus on some farm activities at home.

 

Some Farm Books:

Farm Animal iPad Apps:

Okay, so Milk the Cow might not be an app everyone will enjoy, but it does demonstrate where cow’s milk comes from…

Foam Farm Animal Puzzles

For this activity all you need are a few pieces of foam, scissors, a marker and glue (if you want to add details), a window, some water, and a brush or spray bottle

 

Animal Round-Up Game

This is a simple game I devised to help M with number recognition, counting, the concept of less and more, word recognition and sorting. All you need to get started is some card stock paper, a black and red marker, and some little foam farm animals (i got mine from the dollar store) or you could use small plastic farm animals or simple cutouts. Whatever you use, you will need 10 of each animal. The number of different animals you use depends on the number of players you have. When it was just M and I playing I only used 3 different animals (30 total), but when his 2 cousins came to play we doubled it and used 6 different animals (60 total).

Each player gets a pen or a barn (I just crudely drew a few connecting lines on card stock to make a pen to hold the animals). Then I cut up some card stock and wrote a number in red and the word of the animal in black (you want to vary the numbers on the cards to help with number recognition). Make sure the total number in the end for each animal adds up to 10.Shuffle the cards and put them face down on the table, then take your animals and sort them into piles of 10. The first player draws a card. Encourage him/her to read the number in red first, and then look at the initial, and final letter (if necessary) of the animal word to help him/her figure out what the word is.

The player then collects the specified number of animals written on the card he/she drew from the pasture (centre of the table) and puts them in his/her pen or barn. Continue playing this way until all of the cards have been drawn and all of the animals have been rounded up from the pasture.

It’s a really simple, fun, and versatile game (you can switch it up and do it with zoo animals, bugs, etc.)

 

Tractor Tire Art

On the day we tried this M and I were both itching to get outside. The snow had finally melted from the day before and it was the first warm sunny day we had had all week. I grabbed a flattened cardboard box, a couple of M’s toy tractors, some paint, a disposable pan, and we were off!

 

 

Magnetic Spelling

For this activity you will need letter magnets, pictures of farm animals with magnetic tape fastened to the back of them, some paper, a marker and a magnetic surface (a cookie sheet works great, but so would a fridge or a door).

My magnetic letters are uppercase, so I decided to write in all lower case to make it slightly more challenging.

While M was searching for the letter he needed, I encouraged him to make its sound.

And that’s how I kept my oldest bug busy this past week. Stay tuned for more farm-inspired activities!

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