The largest group of children in the visitor room to date…..57 children! 

Today was a visit with a difference. The Reception and Year 1 children from Bredon Hancocks school came out at the same time. I decided that I would change the structure of the day to accommodate so many children. We split the children into groups and they did a round robin of activities in and around the farm yard. The morning activities were; meet the big calves, make a cows face with an ear tag, make a bird feeder, make a squishy robin, make a feathery book mark and make a pine cone chicken. The children took all their craft activities home with them.  

After lunch 57 very, very muddy children came out of the play wood with big smiles on their face. Although some of the adults had managed to keep clean in the wood, by the time they had helped the children change they were just as muddy. A proper experience of a farm in a wet January. 

  

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. 

 

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. 

The lovely ‘Cats’ class from Cropthorne-with-Charlton CE First school came to the farm today. Our topic today was about ‘harvest’ from the farm. We started the morning discussing the different foods which are sourced from dairy cows and at lunchtime the children were offered samples of red, green and blue topped milk. Green was the most preferred. Our discussion moved on from dairy cows to Autumn and the children told me the things they expected to see on the farm in September. 

At the start of our farm walk, we looked at the wheat grains in the farm shed, ready to feed the calves in the morning. We thought about why we didn’t see any yellow wheat plants out in the fields and why the yellow straw is so useful. 

We then split into five teams. Each team had a bucket and were challenged to fill the bucket with lots of items from nature. The children were fantastic at finding interesting leaf shapes, grass heads, hedgerow berries and acorns. In the orchard we looked at the fruit trees and found different sized and varying colours of apples and pears. The children enjoyed picking the almost black ‘Worcester Black’ pears.

After lunch the five teams were challenged to use the materials in the play wood and the contents of their buckets to make a picture of a tree. The results were fantastic and a really good activity for the children and the competitive adults! 

 

 

 

The lovely early years and reception children from Dormer House School, came out to Sandfield Farm today. The weather was perfect. The children were very good when it came to thinking of ideas of what might be dangerous on a real farm. We had a lovely walk, through the long grass to look at the wild bird mix cover crop. The children were very good at finding small seeds for the small birds and large seeds for the large birds. We then walked through the wheat stubble and heard the sound of the stubble crunching underneath are feet. 

The children were fascinated by the hole dug by the badgers looking for beetles, worms and slugs. Later in the day we found another hole made by the badgers for their latrine! Once in the field with the calves, the children were excellent at standing still and quietly, they loved the challenge of seeing how close the calves would come to them. The children found it hard to believe that the animals infront of them were only calves, rather than fully grown cows. 

As the weather was so wonderful we thought we would see which creatures we could catch in the pond. Most of the mini beasts caught in the pond were waterboatmen. As we walked back for lunch we looked at the different berries in the autumn hedgerow. 

The children loved the mud in the playwood after lunch.