Growin' crops on the farm

I. love. the. farm.  So much so that we're extending our Social Studies curriculum to teach "On the Farm" for 2 weeks {who can do it in only two 45 minute lessons?!} plus doing fall leaves, apples and pumpkins separately in science from pretty much now to November.  :)

We used Shannon's farm circle map to record what we saw on the farm as we watched Let's Explore: Around the Farm on Discovery Education.

We, of course, had to learn about baby animals and the various animal types so we made a farm book to tell each name.  {click for file.}  Farm Animals: A first look was another great Discovery Ed video to give us the information before we recorded it in our books!  Enchanted Learning also has a list of female/male/baby animal names but BE WARNED: the female dog is listed as a B*.  Thankful today that my kids can't read yet since I pulled it up on the SmartBoard!!!!  We just called both adult dogs "dogs."  LOL

  

I also made a Farmer, Farmer, What do you see? book based on Bill Martin.  Students fill in sight words I, see, a & me as they read the predictive text to practice colors, one-to-one correspondence and sight words.  {click the pic for the file!}

I'm all over the animals and apples and pumpkins {coming soon!} but realized that I never really did a great job of teaching the crops and produce that come from a farm in the past!  So after seeing Kinder by Kim's garden unit, we decided to spice it up a little bit by learning about crops.  If you haven't read it, Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens is a GREAT place to start!

We created the above bulletin board after reading the story and categorizing crops by how they grow and what part we eat.  I got pictures from the internet and the writing structure says ____ is a _____ I can eat.  {click for the file}  We added a little something extra to everything to jazz it up:

The apples got glitter for shine.  The tomato got a tissue paper stem.  The peapods got pom pom peas stuck inside.  The celery got green yarn for strings.  The potatoes got googly eyes for eyes.  {yes, I know this is totally inaccurate but I just couldn't help myself!}  The lettuce got glitter for some leaf depth.  The carrots got orange pipe cleaner ridges and the corn got tissue paper husks.

And what's a great garden without a scarecrow to protect the crops?!  We completed this scarecrow glyph {click the pic} to tell all about our favorite things of fall.  You'll notice the drawn crops and popsicle stick post.  ;)  I might blow it up next year to make it a little bigger because some of my kids had a hard time cutting out the small pieces but I think it's still cute!

How do YOU celebrate the farm???  :)