AJ and Me

Week 1- Farm

AJ will be 4 this month and it feels like everybody is starting school! We began our first week of planned activities on Monday…and what a week it was!

AJ and I read On The Farm, a new early reader level 1 from the Read With Usborne series. After talking about all the different kinds of animals she read about, I broke out the bucket of farm animals (link below). AJ sorted them first by number of legs, then by species. She especially liked the pigs so I revised an activity later in the week to be more pig-centric.

AJ has been practicing writing numbers (we made a number line 1-12) and adding 2 numbers together in board games, so I was excited to find this activity from The STEM Laboratory (Yay free printables!) where AJ counted animals, wrote in the numbers, and then added them together. Part of that printable included a page to write out the finished equations, and AJ LOVED writing plus and equal signs!

Check them out here!

We also started reading stories from Usborne’s Complete Book of Farmyard Tales- two or three stories each day.

On Tuesday, we read one of my all time favorite books- The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown. Then we built a barn from triangles AJ cut out herself- she had fun figuring out how to put them back together to make a rectangle and a roof! Then she added animals using the Melissa & Doug Baby Farm Animals Stamp Set (link below).

Later in the day we moved on to tracing and reading 3 letter words (thanks to these awesome printables from A Dab of Glue Will Do.

Mid-week is our homeschool co-op field trip; this week the 3-6 year olds visited a frog pond and explored its ecosystem. AJ enjoyed catching tadpoles and having a Monarch caterpillar crawl all over her hands.

For the last day of farm week, a friend came to visit! The girls read Hen’s Pens (From the Ted and Friends phonics readers) and designed handprint chickens. As we read the story, we talked about all the different features of a chicken- wings, beak, feet, etc.

Then…..piggy day! Inspired by this post over at Fantastic Fun and Learning we made “mud” from cocoa powder, corn starch, and water- set up the pigpen and taught them the “6 in the pen” song. They had so much fun exploring the mud, rolling pigs through it, experimenting with mud splatters (definitely a messy activity….we should have put the girls in smocks), and making up their own variations to the song! A great story to go with this activity is “Curly Gets Lost” from the Farmyard Tales book.

Finally, the girls made butter. We talked about cows and cream and milk and butter- then I gave each of them a taste of heavy cream before handing them each a jar of it. We all went outside, put on some dancing music, and shook shook shook it up! I don’t think they believed me at first, but when we checked at the midway stage, the cream had already begun to thicken. I saved the buttermilk for making bread next week, and we all enjoyed the most delicious fresh butter on bread for an afternoon snack.