Plan farm-themed lessons for toddlers.
Harness the toddler-pleasing appeal of tractors, barn-yard animals and life on the farm when planning farm lessons for your class. Kick off farm week with a visit to the local library to borrow a stack of farm-themed children's stories. Place pictures of farms and the animals that live there on classroom walls. Fill the blanks in your lesson-planning book with simple farm activities toddlers will enjoy.
Farm Language Lesson
Teach farm-animal sounds and memorization skills at circle time with the help of the children's classic, Old MacDonald. Play a recording or sing the song each day of farm week. (See lyrics at dltk-teach.com.) Before class, gather stuffed farm animals that match the song lyrics. Place the animals in a pile in the center of your circle. As you sing the song with children, lift the corresponding animal when making the animal sound. As the week progresses, give each child an animal to hold. When the class sings the song, the child with the matching animal holds it up and makes the animal sound.
Farm Art
Plan two farm-themed art projects for your toddler class. Make pictures of sheep from children's hand-prints early in the week. Paint little hands with black tempera paint. Press painted hands onto green construction paper. When the hand-prints are dry, turn the papers upside down. Let toddlers dip cotton balls into liquid glue, and then place them on the palm of the hand-prints to become the sheep's woolly coat. The thumb-print is the head of the sheep and the fingers become the legs.
Wrap up farm week art-time with a collage project. Before class, cut various-size circles, rectangles, squares and triangles from colored construction paper. Show your toddlers pictures of tractors. Give each child a piece of white construction paper and help the children use glue sticks to make a tractor from the paper shapes.
Dramatic Farm Play
Cover language-development and social skills practice in your toddler lesson plan with the placement of farm-themed clothing and objects in your classroom pretend center. When you introduce the items to your toddlers, name each object and describe its use on the farm. Provide a child-size plastic hoe and shovel. Place stuffed farm animals in the center. Show the children the themed clothing you added to the dress-up basket. Explain each article of clothing -- a straw hat to shield a farmer's head from the sun and boots to protect his shoes in the barn. Observe toddlers at play as farmers, and then write a synopsis of the interaction you observed to post on your classroom bulletin board.
Farm Matching Lesson
Plan a small-group lesson that teaches toddlers about farm-animal mothers and babies, while providing fine motor-skill practice. Buy farm-animal matching cards at a teacher supply store or make a set. You can find a set of farm-animal cards to download and print at alphabet-soup.net. Color, cut and laminate the cards. Lay out all of the cards and encourage the children to take turns selecting a mother animal from the cards, and then matching it to the correct baby animal.
Tags: construction paper, farm week, animal sound, animals that, Before class, each child