Farm Week
The Orange Classroom went to the farm this week, or as close to it as possible without leaving our school. The room was filled with farm animals, many kinds of barns, puzzles, books, songs, and art projects all related to the farm. A small sampling of offerings is seen below.
Every day we sang a song using stuffed farm animals as prompts. The children loved this song and sang with gusto. A copy of the song went home today in the orange folders and here you can see the animals that visited.
Our bulletin board is a crowded farm. In fact, when I finished pinning up today’s project, some children told me that there are too many animals on the board. You can see the barn project, along with the sheep (mirror painting), chickens that lay eggs that spell names, cows (lots of cutting), and pigs (lots more cutting).
On Friday, I read the lovely story, Farmer Will. Will loves to play with his toy farm animals. In the story, he brings them outside every day, where the animals can ‘stretch’, and he appears to play with live animals. In the end, he brings them back inside as they revert to toy animals. As I was reading the story, I realized I had all the props in the story close at hand. I’ve mentioned a number of times that using props enhances the experience for the children. They sat mesmerized as my props seemed to follow the story. It is always interesting to see how young children accept the actions in the story without question, but today, when the story was finished, a child asked “Was it pretend when the animals were real?” Your children are at the cusp of identifying fact from fiction, true or false, real or pretend.
Are we creatures of habit? Today we discovered that your children are. For many months there has been a yellow chain attached to the playground gate preventing it from opening wide. When we would go to the playground, I would open the gate wide enough for 2 children to enter together and hold up the chain (it went to a bit higher than my shoulders). The children would go ‘under the rainbow’, sometimes calling out ‘under the rainbow’ as they went. It was plenty high for them to walk under without bending over, but they always did. This week, the yellow chain has been removed. However, most of the children continued to bend over as they walked through the gate. Are you also creatures of habit?