Sheer The Sheep To Make Yarn
Builds on: dramatic play, fine motor skills

What you'll need:

a square piece of clear contact paper
scissors
painters tape
permanent marker
1 bag of cotton balls
a low window
1 plastic knife


What to do:
Use the permanent marker to draw the outline of a sheep on the front of the contact paper. Tear 4 pieces of painters tape measuring the length of each side of the contact paper from the roll. Remove the protective paper from the adhesive side of the contact paper and place your drawing against the window, sticky side facing you. Use the pieces of tape to secure the sides of your picture to the window. Now grab your bag of cotton balls and knife and invite the kids over.

As they stick cotton balls on to the sheep you can explain that during the fall farmers let the sheeps wool grow as thick as it will go. Hand over the knife and tell them that in the spring the farmer shaves off all the wool to make thread with. Let the kids shave off the "wool". Let the kids repeat this as often as they want. When you see that either the sheep isn't sticky anymore or that the interest is waning take a cotton ball and explain that to make thread with the wool farmers pulls the wool apart to make it more fluffy and then use a machine to spin/twist the wool into yarn.  Pull the cotton balls apart as you speak and encourage your kids to do the same. Once it's nice and fluffy pinch the "wool" between your fingers and show the kids how to twist it into small pieces of "yarn".

Related Resources:

Follow the links to a yarn activity and youtube videos about wool pulling and spinning.

Farm Shapes Sewing
Wool Pulling and Spinning Video

The Carrot Seed Farm

The Carrot Seed Farm
Builds on: math, color recognition, fine motor skills

What you'll need:
1 empty cardboard egg carton
green, purple, yellow and orange pipe cleaners
wire cutters
large exacto knife
The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss
* optional: 1 bag of Rainbow Carrots from the health food store

What to do:

Turn the egg carton over so that the egg cups are facing up. Use the exacto knife to cut and X into the center of each cup. Use a pencil to force the X open a little more.

Use the wire cutters to cut the all the pipe cleaners into 2 inch pieces. To create a carrot take a green pipe cleaner and a purple pipe cleaner fold them each in half. Twist the two ends of the purple pipe cleaner together to so that you have a loop at the folded end and a point at the twisted end. Finally, thread the green pipe cleaner through the loop of the purple pipe cleaner and twist close to the loop leaving the ends untwisted for the stocks of the carrots. Repeat with all of your other colors until you have 12. Let your Roo have a shot at it to improve their fine motor skills and hand dexterity.

Once you have them all made push the pointed ends through the holes of the egg cups and place it on the activities table. Once you've read The Carrot Seed you can let your Roo pull out all of the carrots and put them back in. Challenge them with color sorting, counting or color pattern questions.

My favorite part about this activity is that kids always comment that carrots are only orange. I get to pull out Rainbow Carrots and explain that there are lots of different colors for carrots and at snack we test all of the different colors to see if they taste any different from the typical orange ones.

Addition activities:

Follow the links below for some of some more carrot activities, by some other awesome bloggers, to go allow with The Carrot Seed

Soda Bottle Carrots: A Very Small Kitchen Garden
Spring Sensory Tub With Carrots
Carrot Fingers
Preschool Carrot Patch Math Activity