Preschool Co-op Lessons: The Farm

I recently taught for my daughter's co-op preschool for the fist time. We have five kids in the class, and we rotate it to each mom's home each week, so when it was my turn, I taught two lessons. Here is the structure of the day:

9:00-9:15 Structured Play
9:15-9:35 Circle Time
9:35-10:05 Sensory Activity and Free Play
10:05-10:20 Snack
10:20-10:40 Art Time
10:40-11:00 Outdoor/Indoor Play
11:00-11:15 Clean up and close

For both days, I did puzzles and blocks for the structured play. Circle time consists of a welcome song, which includes each of the children's names in the song, followed by updating the calendar and weather chart, and there is a song we sing for the weather, too. Then we go over the letter, color, and shape for the week. Our week we had the letter C, the color yellow, and triangle. We have a color book in the preschool box (which travels to each home, along with the calendar and weather chart) with pictures of things that are all one color on each page, so the kids get to point to one thing that the like on the yellow page that is yellow, and there is also a shape puzzle book where all of the pictures on a page are magnetic puzzle pieces that are the same shape, so the kids get to take a piece, say what thing they have that is a triangle, and then put it back. All of this is basically the same in every circle time, no matter whose house school is at for the day..

On Tuesday, our theme was The Farm. We sang some songs about farms: Old MacDonald Had A Farm (the children really enjoyed getting to choose what animal sound we were going to sing) and The Farmer in the Dell (I had one child be the farmer and let her choose who would be the wife, and she chose who would be the child, and so on, and as they were chosen, they got to stand up). Then we read the book Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin, which is about a farm, but it is a bit of a higher level and their attention wasn't staying focused on it. I had some other farm-related books picked out, but I decided to skip them. We sang another song "This is the way we..." with farm chores for the actions, while I got out my laptop. I used this website to play real recordings of animal sounds and had the children listen and try to identify which animal it was. I think they got all of them except for the turkey.

For our craft on Tuesday, I printed pictures of a pig on pink cardstock and mixed some shaving cream with a little brown paint in a cup for each of the kids. I explained about how pigs need mud to protect their skin, and let them use their hands to smear the shaving cream "mud" on their pigs. It was really fun! They took a long time to dry, but I thought they looked kind of neat after they dried.


It was actually really cool for my daughter that we had just learned about farms in pre-school because we ended up going to a farm, Smallwood's Harvest Farm Park near Leavenworth, WA, as a family that weekend. She fed the animals, rode the cow train, and did other fun farm-related activities.