MEDIUM TERM PLANNER
Personal, Social and Emotional
Development
Key activities & starting points:
*Daily ‘Star of the Day’ awarded and reason
celebrated and explained. Star of the day will
carry out special duties- feed the fish, water
the tomato plants.
*Identifying feelings and changes in feelings of
characters within our stories- suggesting ways
to help them turn from sad to happy.
*Explain to others what they have found out
about the farm
*Visit a farm. Make a news report, describing
what they have seen and what happens on a
farm.
*Role play centred around farm. Working cooperatively with friends to build farmyards from
big blocks.
Nursery
Topic: The Farm
Physical Development
Key activities & starting points:
Term: Summer 1 2015
*Discuss different foods we get from the farm and how they are healthy for us- eg
milk products give us strong teeth and bones etc.
*Moving like different farm animals- skip like lambs, paddle like ducks etc
*Animal lacing cards
*Using scissors to cut out images relating to topic.
*Make animal homes out of construction toys e.g shed
*Hide root vegetables in a tray filled with earth- provide buckets and spades for
digging them out.
*Develop fine motor skills through modelling animals from playdough/ clay
*Use bowls/ spoons/ tweezers to explore grains such as rice.
*Use pedal bikes and trikes to pretend to drive around the farm. Mark out fields and
act out jobs to do- mend fences, plant crops, etc
*Set out large apparatus and mats. Take children, as if farmers, on an imaginary walk
around the farm- through muddy tracks, up ladders into hay lofts, around fields, into
barns etc
*Building dens
*Opportunities to play in the big playground in order to provide a larger space to
negotiate.
*Climbing frame
*Opportunities to write names and begin to form letters correctly
*Glitter writing
*Name card/ farming word flash cards to trace
*Labelling self made farm yard booklets.
Communication and Language
Key activities & starting points:
*Follow instructions for jobs on the farm.
*Talk about different jobs on the farm- mucking out pens,
shearing sheep, milking cows, planting crops / the process of
how produce comes from the farm to our shops
*Join in with the retelling and repeating refrains of our class
stories
*Positional language: Animals on a farm
Use how/ why/ what questions in relation to farming- eg- how
is cheese made; etc
*Role play area- Farm shop/ barn area
* Share stories about farms and farmers
*Discuss animals and their babies and vocab relating to this.
How are they the same? How are they different? Use
matching cards
* Farm animal puppets
*I went to the market and I bought__
*Put out a box of clothes. Invite the children to select
clothes that a farmer would wear to work on a muddy field.
MEDIUM TERM PLANNER
Mathematics
Key activities & starting points;
*Organising toy animals according to size
*Recognising 1 more/ 1 less numbers
*Counting sets of animals and matching numerals
to quantity
*Combining two groups of objects to find the
total- demonstrate using animal toys/ eggs etc
*Names of days of the week/ months of the year
*Use egg boxes and make and count play dough
eggs
*Sort animals- either different types of animals/
adult and baby animals/ fam or zoo animals
*Role play area- money and counting in farm shop
*Sequence animals: 1 pig, 2 sheep etc
*Pictograms of children’s favourite animals
*Make animals using 2D shapes
* Beebot- plan route around a farm
*Place correct number of animals in a pen
according to instructions
*Farm animal number songs: 5 Little Ducks, 10 fat
sausages, 5 little speckled frogs- finding 1 less
*finding what ½ more animals would be
*Representing how many animals they have
counted by writing the numbers
*Separating a group of 3 or 4 objects in different
ways and realising the total is the same: ducks in
pond/ eggs in boxes etc
*Dream English shape and number recognition
songs
*Daily counting children at register
*Use positional language to say where the animals
are hiding.
*3D shape recognition games
*Tesiboard- weighing farm animals, ordering farm
animals by size.
*explore concepts of more or less using fishing
game
http://www.iboard.co.uk/iwb/Pig-Pens-667counting groups of 10 objects
*’On The Farm’- Kids Tv Counting
Nursery
Topic: The Farm
Literacy (Reading & writing)
Key activities & starting points;
Core stories;
* Week 1&2 Chicken Licken
*Week 3&4 The Pig In The Pond
*Week 5&6 Farmer Duck
* Non-fiction texts linked to farming
Nursery: Letters and Sounds Phase 1 (aspect 7- oral
blending and segmenting, aspect 4- developing an
awareness of rhyme in speech.) Phase 2 (Linking sounds
to letters)
*Retelling stories through use of story props and role
play.
*Non- fiction labels and fact sheets on animals.
*Using non fiction books and computers to find out
information about various farm animals and farming
practices.
*Provide a range of non- fiction books on the farm topic
for the children to access freely in the setting.
*Making labels for different farm pens- eg pigs, cows
etc
*Writing a list of animals to feed on the farm. Crossing
the animals off the list as they are fed.
* Role play- farm shop- make shopping lists for the
shop.
* Use folded card and animal pictures to create a guess
who book. Encourage the children to write the animal
names.
*Writing letters in glitter and on magic boards- forming
correctly
*I spy with my little eye- farm animals
*Segmenting and blending games. Who is in the pond?
The d-u-ck.
*Rhyming games- linking farm animals to pictures/
objects that rhyme.
*Drawing and painting farm animals for the role play
area
*Drawing maps of a farm- drawing in the animals in their
pens
Term: Summer 1 2015
Understanding the World
Key activities & starting points:
*RE Focus: Special Places
To know that people have places that are
special to them. Where is your special place?
*Collective Worship sessions with Reception
*Discussing how we get food from different
animals – hens – eggs – cows – milk etc.
*Animals and their babies- become familiar with
their names.
*Talk about their favourite food/ animals. How
are their preferences similar/ different to those
of their friends?
*Role play surrounding the life of a farmer based
on information gleaned from non-fiction books/
youtube clips/ dvd’s etc about a farmer’s role
*Visit a farm. Recall and talk about their
experiences. Record these on the ipads for a
news report.
*Planting tomato plants. Taking turns to care for
them and water them
*Talk about how a farmer looks after his animals.
*Talk about how to treat and touch animals- pet
some animals gently at the farm. How must we
touch them? How must we speak around them?
How must we move around them?
*Look at how a piece of chees changes over time
when not in a fridge.
*Compare animals- note the similarities and
differences.
*Compare adult and baby animals. What is the
same? What is different?
*Use beebots to navigate around a farm mat
*Build a tractor with the remote toy and navigate
around a farm obstacle course
*2 Simple paint programs
*Youtube clips: Come Outside: Wooly Jumper,
Eggs, A Day On The Farm
*F is For Farm Animals. Farm Animals Sounds For
Children- eggs
Expressive arts and design
Key activities & starting points:
*Make farm animal head gear for farm yard role
play area
*Use blocks to construct farmyard pens and barns
for the animals to live in
*Use a range of gardening tools in the outside area
to role play planting in the fields
*Farm animals playdough mats
*Songs and rhymes: make up their own versions to
the tune of the wheels on the bus: The cows in the
barn go moo moo moo, the hens in the ___ go __
etc
Baa baa balck sheep, Mr Cow, Old MacDonald,
Dingle Dangle Scarecrow
*Play ‘The Farmer’s In His Dell’
*Clap to the beat of familiar songs
*Mix colours with food colouring and jars, Mixing
pink for pigs and making brown for barns
*Create animals sounds withinstruments
*Farm collage pictures- discussing textures
*Draw pictures of barns- use wax resist with wax
crayons and brown paint. Pink crayons for pigs with
pink paint
*Potato printing activity
*Moving to music: happy, sad, angry, sleepy music
*Large scale cooperative drawings of farmyards
*Painting representations of animals
Make a scarecrow and a lollipop scarecrow
MEDIUM TERM PLANNER
Nursery
Topic: The Farm
Term: Summer 1 2015