Caledonia — There were teachers who taught about farms, ee i ee i oh.
And on that farm at Caledonia Elementary, one taught some math using barn animal stickers, ee i ee i oh.
Wearing a plaid shirt and red bandana, kindergarten teacher Jenny King asked her students — also sporting spiffy bandanas — what kinds of animals they would find on a farm. Several hands shot up and gave answers like cows, chickens and sheep and dogs.
“I have chickens at my house,” Weston said, prompting his classmate, Skyler, to say, “Me too.”
King explained the activity for the day, involving blank barn canvases, animal stickers and creating number sentences, or math problems.
“Your job is to pick no more than five animal stickers and make two groups of two different animals,” she said. “All together, your two groups should equal five.”
Farmer King selected three sheep and one sheep dog and asked how many other animals could fit in her barn.
Her students answered in unison, “One!”
“Write your number sentence,” she told the class. “One plus four equals how many?”
King’s kindergartners responded, “Five!” Then, it was their turn to choose their animals and create a number sentence.
A lover of all things nature and farming, according to her teacher, Skyler sat at her desk, puzzled with her four cow stickers and one rooster.
“This barn isn’t big enough for all my cows,” she said.
After figuring out how to layer her stickers so they all fit on her barn, she shared something she learned about farm animals: “Cows give us milk, chickens give us eggs but dogs don’t give us anything we eat.”
From Farm to Market
Learning to identify farm animals and the kinds of products and food farms produce is part of Caledonia Elementary’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum. Students also learn how plants can make their own food and that animals eat plants and other living things to get their nutrition.
“We’ve learned about how we get the milk and eggs from farms to the grocery store and in the spring, we take a field trip to a local dairy farm,” King explained.
Across the hall in Kelly Peterson’s classroom, kindergartners watched a video reading of a picture book explaining how food travels from farms to markets for people to buy and farmers to earn their income.
“You can use fresh milk from cows to make your own butter or ice cream,” she said, prompting a chorus of “oooo’s” and “ahhhh’s.”
Peterson also explained some of their additional learning goals. Those include reading and explaining how crops become food, demonstrating understanding of farm-related vocabulary words, and writing the sequence of events of getting food from farm to market.
She asked her students, “What would happen if we didn’t have farms?”
One student replied, “We wouldn’t have food and we would all die.”
Read more from Caledonia:
• Kindergarten language arts unit gets royal treatment
• Whole Brain Teaching is elementary
