Down on the Farm

I think the most important thing we came away with in our learning about the farm, is that the farm is pretty important to us all.  We discovered that there are different types of farms.  Some raise animals and some that grow things like vegetables, fruits, and grains.  We spent most of the week focuses on the animals that are raised on the farm.  We created a farm animal book over the course of the week.  We used tree maps to organize our thinking about each animal.  The tree maps helped us to put together complete sentences about the animals we were focused on that day.  Here are some samples from our writing. 

We couldn't have a farm unit without reading Mrs. Wishy Washy stories.  She is one of my favorites.  We started with Mrs. Wishy Washy.  All of her animals loved the mud!  Each animal rolled, splashed, or jumped in the mud.  After retelling this story in a pocket chart, we used talked about adding -ed to the end of a verb.  We made a list of other animals and the action they would use in the mud.  We learned about the different sounds of -ed ("t" like in "jumped"; "ed" like in "wanted"; and "d" like in "played").  Here is our list of animals. 

We also made inferences about Mrs. Wishy Washy after reading a few stories about her. 

We read and compared 2 stories The Flea's Sneeze and Baa-Choo (which we "read" on my Nook using the data projector).  These were 2 really fun stories about farm animals who had a case of the sniffles and sneezes.  We had also created a story map to go along with The Flea's Sneeze.  This story reminded us an awful lot of The Napping House!

We learned about all of the things that we use/eat that animals can provide.  We used grocery store ads to show just how much starts off at the farm before it ends up at the store.  We cut out pictures of everything that comes from the farm and loaded them onto the back of our truck. 

Finally, we talked about the farmer himself.  We listed everything he uses and the many jobs he has.  We wrote about what we do if we were farmers. 

On Friday, we made ice cream from scratch!  It was so crazy I forgot to take any pictures!  It turned out pretty good and was tons of fun!  We used farm animals to help us learn addition fact families this week too!