4-H Cloverbuds – Farm Animals

Our theme for this months Cloverbuds is Farm Animals.  After doing our pledges, we started our meeting discussing the differences between wild animals, farm animals and pets.   I introduced the word “domesticated” to describe farm animals and pets, and talked about how farm animals and pets depend on people to take care of them and provide them with food, while wild animals provide for themselves.

Our first game was a fun way to find out how much the kids knew about the differences between farm animals and wild animals.  I had a bunch of plastic animals and two buckets – labeled wild and farm.  The kids stood behind a line, picked an animal and threw it into the correct bucket.

The kids had a lot of fun but appeared to be throwing the animals pretty randomly.  It took me longer than I care to admit to realize that only two or three of the kids in the group can read enough to know which one said “wild” and which one said “farm”.    The game went slightly better after I pointed out which was which.

After the animals were scattered around the room, we moved onto our next game.   We played “Farmer Says”.  This was played just like “Simon Says” but all the movements had to do with farm animal movements.  “Farmer says….strut like a turkey, hop like a rabbit, wag your tail like a dog, etc.”  I purposely didn’t use things that were just noises, but the kids added the correct sound effects anyway.  Vicki seemed to think every animal walked on four legs making the relevant noise (even a chicken).  The kids had a great time with this and after I went through all the actions I had prepared, I let the kids take turns being the leader.   They REALLY enjoyed that and came up with some very interesting movements.

Wallow like a pig….

After the kids worked off all that energy, we moved on to our crafts.   I’ve been trying to bring two options most meetings.  One for those who like glue, stickers, feathers, and pompoms, and one for those who hate anything called a “craft”.   This month I bought my usual assortment of craft stuff – paper lunch bags, plates, pompoms, scissors, glue, googly eyes, feathers, construction paper – and had the kids make animal puppets or masks or scenes.    This table was pretty much all the girls until right before clean-up time, then the boys joined in (mainly because the other table got cleaned up first).

The other option was Legos.  I bought a bag full of assorted legos and gave the kids the plastic animals with instructions to build a barnyard – a barn, a silo, pens for the animals.  I think we mostly had space ships and robots but it was great to see how nicely (and even quietly!) they all worked together.

The second half of this months theme will be a field trip to a local petting farm.

(Repeat visitors might notice that I’ve watermarked the pictures for the first time.  I recently started using Stat Counter to track blog activity and I noticed that a few pictures had been downloaded.  I decided to watermark the pictures so they couldn’t be used without permission).