farm animal class #2 -- chickens

Spring Break or not for my family, our Monday Homeschool Classes go on! So this week I taught the 2nd of my preschool farm animal series, this time focusing on chickens. Rooster, hens, chicks -- we sang the Old McDonald song with a verse for each of them to get us started. (Photo is one of my hens -- the museum we hold our classes in actually has a pair of Bantam chickens, a rooster and a hen, so the kids got to see barnyard poultry live and in person.) We clucks like hens, we crowed like roosters, we peeped like chicks. And then we played a fingerplay about a rooster and hen.


Our story was Daisy Comes Home, by Jan Brett. A longish (but well worth it!) story, but the kids were great and sat quietly through the whole thing.












Then we played a game of pass-the-egg. The kids all sat in a circle, and each child had a spoon. I sent several plastic eggs around the circle, the kids had to pass them to each other spoon-to-spoon. Great for working on hand-eye coordination! And funny, too.


Our craft -- these adorable little pom-pom chicks hatching out of colorful eggs.


After the craft we played a game of "What time is it, Mrs. Fox?", where the kids were all chickens and I was the fox, and they asked me what time it was. I told them a time (ex: 2 o'clock) and they would take that number of steps towards me (2 steps in this example). Although occasionally, they would ask what time it was and I would say "lunch time!" and they would run screaming from me as I chased and tried to "catch" them. Then the kids took turns being the fox. BIG HIT!

We finished up with a coloring sheet featuring barnyard poultry. (As you can see, Zoo Boy doesn't much believe in the whole coloring-within-the-lines philosophy.)

Next week, another exciting barnyard creature! Stay tuned!