The very lovely Year 1 children from St Richards school Evesham, came out to me for my first visit of the year. Although not fantastic weather, the children were well dressed and were quite happy exploring the farm in the mud! 

Our topic was ‘field to fork’ and I told the children all about milking our cows and what happens to our milk. We also saw some large calves which will be calving this time next year and part of the dairy herd. 

We then had a walk to the small wood. I explained to the children the five things that a farmer checks his/her animals for; available food, available drink, a comfy bed, can they ‘play’ and do they have friends? Each child was given a toy farm animal and asked to build a suitable living space for the animal. The children had to think about creating food, water trough, a bed, friends and a play area for their animal. 

After lunch the children did a taste test of dairy products which including hard cheese, crumbly cheese, full fat milk, semi skimmed milk and skimmed milk, natural skyr yoghurt, honey skyr yoghurt and custard. The honey skyr yoghurt was by far the most popular. 

A really lovely couple of days with two great classes.  

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!