Being in Wisconsin, I feel obliged to do a Farm storytime. As I mentioned in my other post Storytime–Stories about Farms, using animal sounds is a great way to work on phonic awareness. I stand by that storytime, but the activity I prepped (which you can see in the original post) was a little too complicated for some of my younger kiddos. So I thought about a way to keep that interactivity while still learning and using some critical thinking skills. Because my general rule of running a kids program is Activity > Craft. So I came up with a farm obstacle course!
It’s kind of more of a farm activity station, where you move around to different stations and see do the thing. Obstacle Course just sounds more fun. We’re dealing with kids of all ages here, so if something doesn’t go according to plan, it’s totally fine. Learning is still happening, just maybe not what you planned. So here’s my different stations:
Lift up the chickens and count the eggs. So here we’re obviously working on number recognition. My eggs are egg shakers, so a few kids just hung out here the whole time and shook them.
This one is harder. Put the balls in the pig, BUT only certain balls. So working on some critical thinking. Or not, some kids just put balls in the pig and that’s fine. Make sure your ball container is shallow otherwise a kid WILL try to get in it. Bought this pig basket on Amazon, but you can make your own cheap pig bucket like I did for Elephant and Piggie Party.
We’re working on color recognition and sorting. And food identification. I believe that these are Melissa and Doug but I’m sure there’s other versions out there.
Wash the horse with a dry erase eraser. This is just laminated pages and dry erase pens. You can go all out and buy the big dry erase sheets and make a big horse or farm animal silhouette, but probably not worth the effort. Working on some eye-hand coordination here.
Working on some balance and carrying the bucket across the bridge. It was funny when the buckets got tipped over, I would pretend to freak out and say “Ah you spilled the milk everywhere!”
This is from a company called Bouncy Pals. It got good reviews on Amazon and seems pop-resistant. It’s low enough to the ground that almost anyone can get on it. Gave the option to PET the cow for those that couldn’t ride it or didn’t want to. Not sure if you’re really learning anything here, but it is a great photo op, which is important too.
This was 100% the favorite. Found a bunch of little brooms and dustpans and had the kids clean up wuffle balls. Honestly, it could have just been this haha. They loved this. And I had one kid that basically made his own activity and started sweeping up the other balls from the other activities. Working on some more eye-hand coordination here.
Overall a huge success. Again I had different kids at different age levels so not everyone was able to do everything the way it was intended, but everyone had a blast. We did this for about 10 minutes after Storytime–Stories about Farms, we just didn’t do the activity sheet, but you can print it out and have it out for a take-home activity.
I spent maybe about $100 on everything–some of the stuff I already had. But everything can be reused for years to come, so worth the cost. Hope you like it–yee haw!
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