Farm Week: Day 1

We got off to a good start with our study of farms today. The boys and I enjoyed the book All the Places to Love by Patricia Maclachlan & Mike Wimmer. After I read it out loud, I shared with my sons some of the places from my childhood home that were my favorite. I was blessed to grow up in the country on an acreage. Our family owned about 13 acres and thus I had lots of room to play outdoors. My favorite places were: a redbud tree with branches low enough for me to climb, an apple tree with a tire swing, our country "lane" which I liked to walk down and ride my bike on, our chicken house, our grapevines (I loved to pick grapes off them in the summer and squeeze them out of the skin and eat them), our garden (it was HUGE........I'm sure lots of work for my parents), and my little playhouse (This was a wooden "camper" that had been in the back of my uncle's pickup. When he didn't want it, it was "parked" in our backyard and became my playhouse. It had a little front step, windows, and a linoleum floor. It was so awesome.) So..........I had so many places to love growing up. I hope my boys will have similar memories as they get older.

Before we sat down to our "farm work", my youngest son had been playing downstairs and had found a pair of cowboy boots we had bought at the State Fair last summer. He decided he wanted to be a cowboy for the morning..........so he donned his cowboy hat and boots. It was in this garb that he sat down to do our farm activities. How perfect!! I couldn't have planned it any better. I snapped a quick photo of his cowboy-booted foot swinging under the table as he worked on his papers.



As predicted, my little boy liked doing his work. He had a paper from Enchanted Learning with farm animals to color along with another one from the same site where he had to circle the letter for the beginning sound of various farm animals. He is shown below doing that paper. My oldest son completed his papers first and sat with us while my little boy did his coloring paper. He taught his brother how to say each color in French, which was pretty cool.



Below you can see my older son doing his crossword from KidsDomain. He enjoyed doing his work as well.



We didn't do any cooking activities today, but we did go to the library where we got several more farm books. We will delve into those tomorrow. Sadly, I'm feeling too lazy to go pull them out of the bag to list the titles in this post. I will be sure to reference them this week, however. Tomorrow is supposed to be cool and rainy here. I think we will make butter and spread it on biscuits for our cooking activity. That should be fun.

Thanks so much to those of you who left comments about our dog, Buzz. I truly appreciate your kind words and thoughtfulness.