Down On The Farm

For our Farm theme, I decided to have the kids draw some fences around a field. I printed out multiples of a picture of some cows on a field and glued them onto half sheets of construction paper. Then I brought out some red markers and showed the children how to draw AROUND the field. I was really surprised by how awesome they did. Almost all of them did it without any assistance.

In this picture, there are two projects. First, the Maize Maze, was a board I contacted and cut out to make a maze. Then I used some construction paper, cardboard, and contact paper to make the piece of corn. I hot glued a piece of cardboard to the back of the corn, put it through the maze and hot-glued it to a wide piece of cardboard in the back. This one was a little more difficult to make, and needed to be fixed multiple times since some of the kids were trying to pull the corn towards them instead of through the maze. The kids loved it though, so it was worth the extra time put in. The poster was a fun one my co-teacher made about the different colors pumpkins can be. It was a matching game with velcro.

One of the art projects we did for the Farm month was basket weaving. The kids had a great time. I used large construction paper in pink and white and cut it into strips about 2 inches thick. I started the weaving for them and used a glue stick to hold the pieces together. When I sat them down, I pointed to certain strips and had them lift them up or lay them down. I wasn't sure how they would do with this one because it was a little complex, but it actually worked really well. They needed direction the whole time and they didn't quite grasp what I was asking them to do, but once they got started they really loved what they were creating. Once they finished I folded them into the baskets and added the handles. I took some pictures of them weaving and then took some pictures while they were playing with the baskets and placing our plastic food inside of them. We hung them up with the pictures above our dramatic play area and eventually sent them home.

This was a fun take on a typical matching game. I got this idea from one of my co-workers. I printed out two pictures of each type of farm equipment. I contacted a picture down onto the table, then cut the second picture in half. I used just one half of the picture for the children to match down. In her room with her three year olds, she just used one picture and had the children match the halves, but for my twos who are still learning how to play matching games, I figured simpler would be better.

On the back of our library, I set up this little game for the children. They had so much fun finding which animal was at the end of each of the prints. It was really simple to put together too. All I had to do was print out a few pictures, cut out the prints so they could overlap and contact it all down.

For our library center, I made these little booklets. The kids had so much fun counting 1 egg, 3 eggs, and 5 eggs depending on which one they opened. A picture of a chicken contacted onto a piece of posterboard on top, and a picture of different amounts of eggs contacted onto cardboard on the bottom. I like to cover the whole thing in clear contact so that they last for a much longer time. I then took two 2 inch by 4 inch contact paper strips and put one on the outside and one on the inside to hold the two halves together.