Making your farm visit a success
Farm-linked activities for KS1 and KS2 PHSEJump to resources
KS1 and KS2 PHSE activities that can be carried out before, during or after a school visit.
Curriculum area: Developing a healthy, safer lifestyle
- Keeping healthy and happy. Brainstorm what they need to keep them healthy and happy.
- Make a list of people who help us to have enough food - farmers, vets, parents and carers. Make a thank-you card for one of them or write a letter asking what their job involves.
Curriculum area: Preparing to play an active role as citizens
- What do they think animals need (refer to children's pets)? Make a poster - how to care for an animal. Repeat activity for plants.
- Show different eggs (free-range and battery) and their prices. Explain how free-range eggs and battery-hen eggs are produced. Investigate and observe the eggs inside and out, noting the difference in yolk colour; darker yolks indicate hens have been fed corn and lived outdoors. Discuss which they would buy.
- Discuss how farmers have to give back to the soil the food they have taken out. Explain how fertilizers, manure and compost give food back to the soil. Make some liquid plant-food for the plants around school - place nettles or comfrey in a bucket, weigh down with a stone, fill with water, leave a fortnight outdoors and then use.
- Selection of eggs in boxes, free-range and battery
- Nettles or comfrey, bucket, stone, water
Curriculum area: Developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people
- Use photographs of farming or food from around the world; show a photograph and let children say everything they can see; now let children ask any questions they have about anything on the photograph.
- Know your potato (from Learning from experience, Miriam Steiner, Tretham Books) Brainstorm everything children know about potatoes. Divide children into groups and give each child a potato to study in silence using their hands and eyes. Put potatoes in the middle of the groups and mix them up, then let children take it in turns to find their own potato. Discuss how they knew it was their potato and draw up a list of similarities and differences. Consolidate this work with work on potatoes eg life of a potato from planting to table. (Can use apples, carrots or lemons as alternatives).
- Photographs/books of farming or food from around the world
- Roughly equal-sized, washed potatoes