Farm Animals (Montessori Activities and More)

After our study of earthworms and flatworms, we went back to talking about vertebrates.  One day last week, we learned a bit more about domesticated animals. We talked about some pretty fascinating things with DD and LD. Can you guess out of the millions of animal species how many large animals have been successfully domesticated? I’ll tell you in just a minute below!

For ED we pulled in a few Montessori activities:

ED went over some Montessori cards we have, “Where Do Things Come From?” that I got free from Montessori For Everyone.

I had these Mama-Baby Farm animal matching cards and ED liked these cards. In fact, she took some of the cards to her room to play a game. I hope to get them back again! I don’t have the link for these any more, but I’m sure if you look around you could easily find something equivalent.

I love these farmyard families I found over at The Helpful Garden. We went over the names of the male, female and baby farm animals (such as bull, cow, calf).  To make it more engaging for the kids, I hid them around the house and made them go hunt them down. In order to know whether they had found them all, they had to sort them into family groups!

Although I don’t have pictures of DD and LD, they wanted to do a scavenger hunt too!! They also learned a bit of new vocabulary from this Montessori activity!

What’s in Your Cookie? – Free Printable about Where Things Come From

There is a fascinating National Geographic Series that my friend mentioned called Guns, Germs and Steel. The show actually explores the causes of inequity world-wide.  It’s fascinating! I’ll probably sit down to watch the shows with LD (9), but in the meantime we watched a short segment of the first episode together about domesticated animals.

We learned that of the 148 large plant-eating land mammals, only 14 have ever been domesticated! He explains some of the factors necessary for domestication… and talks about why, for example, zebras have never been ridden into battle! We were also surprised to learn just where these animals originated.  The scientist speculates that this is a large reason why some societies flourished and others did not.

You might be interested in our Animal Packet:

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~Liesl