We often receive requests for a farmer to go into a local school and talk about life on a dairy farm. If you're visiting a school, here are some neat ideas to help you....
Advance Preparation (if you have time):
- You could take photos of the milking process, the vats and other things around the farm that you want to talk about and email them to the teacher who will display them on a big screen while you talk.
Props you could take:
- Buckets of different feed that the children can touch, feel and smell.
- A calfeteria - the kids will love crowding around it pretending to be calves.
- How about arriving in your normal clothes and then putting on your gumboots, overalls and milking gloves/apron?
Activities with the children:
- Split the children up into groups depending on which kind of food they'd like and use a stretched out skipping rope to mimic an electric fence to keep the hungry cows at bay, moving it a little at a time.
- Act out which kind of cow are you - friesian or jersey? Then practice mooing to find the other cows in your herd.