Brainy Bees Preschool

Hi Mom,

This week we finished our Down on the Farm unit. We learned about different kinds of crops- animal related crops like milk & meat from cows and wool from sheep and orchard crops like apples and peaches (which we got to pick for ourselves off the trees at Schnepf Farms later this week) and field crops, like vegetables (which we also got to pick from the fields at the Farm!) After discussing the different tools that farmers use to plow, sow and harvest fields, we created a farm field scene as a class and pretended to "harvest" our crops one by one.

For writing practice, we completed the sentence "If I were a farmer, I'd grow...". Our work on this project really made Ms. Marianne happy! It shows that we're really putting everything together that we've learned about letters, the sounds they make and the words they're used to create. We decided which crop we'd grow and then worked with Ms. Marianne to sound out that word. Then, all by myself, I figured out which letter each sound made and wrote that letter on my paper! It was so awesome!! As farmers, we want to grow

'apls'

'scwash' (I had a little help on the -sh part!)

'strobires'

'letus'

Didn't we do GREAT?!?

Once we had finished our writing, we put all our knowledge of the parts and functions of a farm into practice and created a farm scene of our own using stickers and construction paper. We made brown mud pits for our pigs, blue ponds for our ducks, green pastures for our sheep & cows and some of us even put blue clouds and a yellow sun in the sky.

For math, we continued working on recognizing and understanding our single and teen numbers, and extended our skills a little more by looking for numbers that Ms. Marianne called out in the grocery ads. There are SO many numbers in the pages of those newsprint ads... it was tricky for us to find the one she wanted. We worked together sometimes and on our own if we felt like we could do it all by ourselves. But we found every number she called out!

riding the slide into the goat pen

On Thursday of this week, we all met at Schnepf Farms to celebrate our learning! We saw most of the animals we had learned about and practiced using the correct name for each (i.e. boar / sow / piglet) and we had a blast in the petting zoo seeing them up close and in person. Who knew that goats were that friendly (and that the kids are that cute!) and that pigs smelled THAT yucky?? pee-yoo!

plugging our noses near the pigs

We had some great discussion questions during our field trip like "Why aren't the pigs pink?" (they were dark brown, but not because they were dirty!) and we learned a lot about the animals by being near them.

We also were privileged to pick vegetables (like the squash one of us wanted to grow!) from the fields the farmer had planted just for visitors to harvest from. It was such a neat experience to be able to pluck the sun ripened zucchini, the juicy tomatoes, the (really, really REALLY stuck) carrots and more from the warm, wet dirt and take them home to wash and eat! I can't wait to make a salad and to steam some of our zucchini!

One of the ladies who worked at the farm taught us how to pick the peaches that were just right from the trees in the orchards on the farm. She told us to get right up close to them and sniff. If they smelled like a peach, they were ready to pick and take home! This really helped us when we got to the orchards and were ready to pick our crop... and she was right- the peaches that smelled like peaches really did taste perfect. Ms. Marianne even chopped some up and put them over vanilla ice cream for a tasty treat later on... yuuuuummmm!

While we were on the farm, we also got to