Unit Study: Farms

When Sweet Pea asked to learn more about farming, I got on my computer and requested more farm books from the library than we could possibly read and we got started!

Here are the books we read:

You Wouldn’t Want to Live Without Bees, by Alex Woolf

Backyard Chickens, by Avery Reed

How Did That Get in My Lunchbox?, by Chris Butterworth

Farming, by Gail Gibbons

Give Bees a Chance, by Bethany Barton

Right this very minute: a table-to-farm book about food and farming, by Lisl H. Detlefsen

PB&J Hooray! : your sandwich's amazing journey from farm to table, by Janet Nolan

Molly's Organic Farm, by Carol L. Malnor

The Ugly Vegetables, by Grace Lin

Growing Vegetable Soup, by Lois Ehlert

Chicks and Chickens, by Gail Gibbons

Millie’s Chickens, by Brenda Williams

Before We Eat: From Farm to Table, by Pat Brisson

Sun in my Tummy, by Laura Alary

Farm Animals, by Joanne Mattern

Henrietta’s Guide to Caring for Your Chickens, by Isabel Thomas

On the farm, at the market , by G. Brian Karas.

Farm, by Elisha Cooper

Libby Wimbley: Mother Hen, by Amy Cobb

We started off by starting a few seeds to plant in our vegetable garden this year, so we could watch their progress over the next few weeks. We also put some beans in a bag with a damp paper towel, so we could get a closer look at the germination process. Of course, I forgot to take a picture of this.

We also discussed where our food comes from. We found several really fun books on this subject at the library. We made homemade brownie mix, and researched where flour, sugar, and cocoa powder come from. Now, whenever we eat these brownies, we think about where the ingredients came from. Mainly, I wanted the girls to have more of a connection with our food and its origin, instead of just assuming everything comes from a grocery store. It's easy for them to connect eggs and milk with farming, but I wanted them to think a little deeper.

The girls also created a farmer's market, which was a really great way to practice counting and using money.

And of course, you couldn't have farms without bees, so we took a day or two to learn about bees and pollination. We've learned about this in the past, but this was a nice review. We had a special snack that helped us visualize how pollination works.

For the second part of our farm unit study, we shifted to learning about animal farms. We made our own cheese, using milk from a local dairy farm. We made paneer, which is pretty easy to make at home without special ingredients. Since chickens are the favorite animal currently, we spent a lot of time learning about the chicken life cycle, parts of a chicken, parts of an egg, etc. We let an egg sit in a cup of vinegar overnight to dissolve the eggshell so we could get a better look inside. We had a lot of fun with this experiment.

This was also a good time to talk about ethics in farming. It was really interesting to see the girls thinking about questions such as "do chickens really need to be treated humanely if they're just going to be slaughtered and eaten anyway?" For Sweet Pea's birthday, we visited a local farm owned by a friend of ours, and were able to talk about the differences between her chickens and the chickens on large, factory farms.