What We Do: The Farm: Cows and Pigs

This is the only pig we have in our house, and we don't have any cows

I'm not quite sure how to organize our Farm unit for you on the blog... so if it doesn't make much sense, well, I guess just pretend that it does.

I checked out the Farm Story Kit from the library and was not very impressed. I didn't see any cute crafts or activities or songs or rhymes or anything. So I didn't DO anything for an entire week except read some books - therefore, a lot of our farm posts come from books and I will highlight a bunch of books that we liked.

I almost forgot to mention, the week before we actually started into this unit the story time at our library highlighted farms! It was perfect. On their puppet show they had Old McDonald come but as he sang his song, he kept singing out his kangaroo, hippo, jelly fish, skunk, and pirate, instead of things like cows and horses and pigs. It was so cute. Then they showed a slideshow of how their are other kinds of farms besides traditional, like fish farms, worm farms, and wind farms. They are very creative. It was a great kick off for our unit.

This was the Story Time activity. Joshua's is the one with the skunk.

Why don't I just start with our favorite farm books:

Notice the same illustrator for both books. I highly recommend her books. So for we've read three and they are hilarious! The illustrations really make the book.

These are books we already had. The German books were especially nice and highly educational

And then we decided to do some crafts. Like I said, nothing good in the Farm Story Kit, and then the Cow and Pig kits were already checked out. So I made up these little pieces. (Cousins Maren and Hazel came over to play with us that day so we roped them into crafting!)

I had all the cow pieces cut out and ready to glue, as well as some odd shaped black felt pieces the kids could then glue on the cow. Add some googly eyes, hand them some markers, and these cows are what you get.

I drew the pigs and then let the kids use glue and glitter for the pig bellies. We also used pipe cleaners for their tails. I think the pigs would have been more of a hit if they had got to glue all the pieces on like the cow, but I didn't have time to cut out so many more little pieces.

Here are our Pig and Cow books. Joshua really liked "Chester" but I wasn't terribly impressed. I wasn't too impressed with the other pig book either. And Joshua found both of the cow books in the library on his own... I'm not quite sure how he did that. He really likes "Millie" but my favorite was definitely "Cows that Type." I've included my very favorite page :)

You probably can't read that. It says: Duck was a neutral party, so he brought the ultimatum to the cows.

We also watched a few farm movies. Kleiner Roter Traktor is actually British, I think, so you could get it in English quite easily. I like it a lot. It is very pre-school friendly, as in age-appropriate. And if you haven't seen The Adventures of Milo and Otis you need to run, not walk, to your library and check it out. I love this movie, and kids love it to. It took 4 years to make this film. I remember watching it as a kid and loving it. It is so fun to see my kids running around pretending they are the dog or the cat. And it has a lot of farm scenes, so I figured we could get it from the library again... even though we returned it to the library just 2 weeks ago.

OK, there is also a scene in Milo and Otis where the dog and cat part ways. Joshua tears up every time he sees it. Although he pretends that he's tough and tells me "water just comes into my eyes at this part."

And last but not least, we went to Thanksgiving Point Farm Country today for their Sheep and Wool Festival. Here are our photos that have to do with cows and pigs and the other general farm things - or just photos I thought were cute. These are photos with our friends Nathan, Sarah, and Melissa. Nathan is Joshua's best friend and Melissa and I are pretty tight too. They are so much fun.

I'm guessing the scale is broken. Sarah buy herself weighs as much as 5 chickens, just FYI

You try getting four little kids to look and you and smile at the same time.

lunch time - eating other people's crackers

We fed the cows for a long time. But when we fed the llamas, Abby started crying and told me that the llama ate her thumb. That was the end of feeding time for us.