The visitor room had a touch of Christmas about it, as a group visited to experience Christmas on the farm and take home their Christmas crafts. 

 

Hosted a fun lego party this weekend, a joint effort between myself and a friend. 

When the children arrived they traced a lego man from a light box. 

The wonderful children and staff from Badsey First Holiday Club came to the farm today and had the most glorious Autumn weather. An improvement on their very wet summer holiday visit! 

After the health and safety talk I split the group into teams. Each team was given a bucket and asked to fill it with items from nature during our farm walk. They took the instruction literally and the buckets were overflowing, infact half way through the walk we left them on the side of a field to be picked up later, as they were too heavy. 

We went into the orchard to pick up fallen cooking apples and acorns. Whilst looking at the cows water trough an apple was ‘accidentally’ dropped into the water. The children were quick to realise that throwing apples into water is good fun, as they quickly float back to the surface. 

At the end of the farm walk we went into the play wood and used the items in the bucket to create an Autumnal tree. Then after lunch the children used the collected cooking apples and acorns plus some conkers to make Halloween spiders. As the sun was shining still we headed out into the play wood for a long play with lots of mud. 

Today Lime Class from Welcombe Hills School visited a very wet farm. The children were great when it came to thinking about what could be dangerous on a real farm. Having discussed tractors and quad bikes it was clear that the children wished to sit on the farm vehicles. We started our activities by taking it in turns to sit on the quad bike.

We then thought about our topic of Stoneage. With charcoal from the campfire we drew cave paintings on the cow shed wall. Whilst we were doing this, the shed was being prepared for winter housing the calves. We then looked at the calf food and with a stone tried to crush some wheat seeds to make flour. We decided that Stoneage man must have worked very hard to make bread. 

We ventured into the playwood but the rain was really heavy. We dashed back to the classroom and set up our own toy farm. After lunch it was still raining heavily and so the children made balloon stressball animals. Then we went back to the topic of Stoneage and sat and had a campfire (with non Stoneage marshmallows). The children finished their trip by finding a very muddy puddle in the playwood…….they loved it! 

The lovely chatty Willow class from Astley CE School came to the farm today to learn about animal classification. We started the day thinking about different animals and their characteristics. I lined up all my animal toys and we could see similarities and differences. The toys were split into mammals, amphibians, reptiles and birds. I also put out some feathers and had ‘buzz’ my stuffed Buzzard to show the children. 

On the farm walk the children looked at the wild bird mix we have planted to feed to birds and small mammals on the farm. We then went pond dipping. I couldn’t believe how many minibeasts the children found. The children were very lucky to see dragon flies flying above the plants in the pond. The dragon flies were very brown in colour and smaller than the emerald green ones I see in the summer. A girl presented me with a mini beast I hadn’t seen before, which turned out to be beetle larvae. The pond yields different creatures in the Autumn. 

In the play wood the Year 2 children remembered their ‘fairy tales’ trip to the farm last year and re-enacted Billy Goats Gruff on the big climbing logs.