Teach kids about animal reproduction and husbandry through farm science activities.
Farm science is an important unit in the lesson plans of early childhood education and is not just for schools in agricultural communities. Farm science activities teach children about how food and other resources are grown. It also teaches respect for plants, animals and the land.
Milking the Cow
Show students where milk comes from with a milking activity to teach that milk does not just come from the supermarket shelf. Fill a rubber glove with milk and tie the wrist portion to the bottom of a chair or to the underside of a sawhorse. The fingers of the glove will represent a cow's udder. Place a pail underneath the glove and use a sewing needle to poke tiny holes in the tips of the finger. Have children sit on a stool and practice milking the cow. Show them pictures or a video of an actual milking and explain the biology behind milk production. To milk the "udder," instruct students to take two of the glove fingers in each hand, squeeze the top of the glove fingers between their thumb and forefinger, and repeatedly and gently squeeze down to release a stream of milk.
Plants Need Water
Illustrate how plants take in water by using celery and colored water. Talk to students about how all living things need water to survive and how farm vegetables and grains require irrigation. Provide the students with jars. Have them fill the jars halfway with water. Add a few drops of red food coloring to each jar to turn the water red. Slice bunches of celery at the bottom so you have individual stalks. Leave the foliage at the top. Give each student their own stalk and have them insert the stalks into their jars of water. Over the course of the next few days, children will see the red water creeping up through the veins, turning the celery red.
Farm Animal Babies
Teach kids about animal reproduction, what the offspring of farm animals are called and what they look like with a flash card match game. Create flash cards with images and names of farm animals. Create corresponding flash cards of the farm animals' young. Examples include a cow and a calf, a chicken and a chick, a pig and a piglet and sheep and a lamb. Introduce the animals, their offspring, the sounds they make and the basic practices of animal husbandry to the kids. Mix up the cards and give each student one. They are to become the animal on the card. Don't let them show their cards to others yet. Round up students into a confined area and tell them that they are in a corral or in a barn. Then say that the door to the corral or barn has been left open, giving them the opportunity to escape. At this point, students can scatter throughout the room. Now that they are dispersed, tell them babies and their parent animals need to find each other. Kids will then go about and work to match up the correct animal and offspring cards.
Tags: farm animals, about animal, about animal reproduction, animal reproduction, corral barn, each student, flash cards