Spring Term Project – Down on the Farm!
Get your wellies on and join us on our fun adventures on the farm! This topic always delights our children providing great opportunities for learning over all 7 areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage.
Children’s literature has a multitude of farmyard tales to ignite young imaginations and inspire an early love of reading and books. Once children are familiar with a story, it’s important to offer them opportunities to re-run, explore and develop the storylines for themselves. Small world play is ideal for this, and is also a great way to encourage talk and narrative play.
Children enjoy drama – acting-out their favourite farmyard tale with accompanying animal noises and songs. Dress up and role-playing develop language and provide opportunities for children to copy the adult world, which they love to do. A Farm Shop can encourage discussions about buying and selling. Early writers can make a price list. Counting, adding and subtracting, weighing and measuring, can be introduced in fun and relaxed ways that encourage even the very youngest of our children to develop an early interest in numbers and maths.
Learning about the different animals that live on the farm opens opportunities for activities such as:
- Looking at animal covers – skin, fur, scales, wool, feathers.
- Discussions about things we get from animals ie food, clothing.
- Pictures of animals encourage talk about body parts – head/body/legs/tails; feet – hooves/paws/webbed. Mathematical activities can again be easily encouraged; counting, numbers, pairs etc
- Looking at similarities and differences between humans and animals. Matching parent to baby animal leads to conversations about human and animal families.
- Looking at the needs of animals – shelter/food/care – the importance of taking care of them throughout the year teaches the children about responsibility and looking after others.
This topic of course gives us many ideas for outdoor learning and play. Talking about the different crops that are grown on our farms leads on to some great planting and growing ideas for the spring. We will also incorporate discussions about the different seasons – new growth in the spring and summer, and the harvest in autumn. Easter time provides the perfect opportunity for our children to learn about eggs and how they hatch into chicks.
As always throughout the term, our children will be enjoying a whole range of great arts and crafts activities based on our farmyard theme.
Please let us know if you would like to contribute anything to our project. The children are always very excited to welcome visitors who can give us a little talk, or bring something farm related into nursery for us to see.
The team at Children’s House are really looking forward to this term’s project, and we’re certain that you’ll all look forward to some fabulous “Eee-I, Eee-I, Oohing!!!”
