Making your farm visit a success
Farm activities for KS1 History
Jump to resourcesKS1 History activities that can be carried out before, during or after a school visit.
Curriculum area: Chronological understanding
Activities:
- Make a timeline of a day spent at farm; a farmer's day; a milking cow's day.
- Sequence the journey of milk from cow to milking to shop.
Resources needed:
- Farm visit
- Series of pictures of milking process
Curriculum area: Changes within Living Memory
Activities:
- Comparing old and new - machinery, vehicles, milking styles, tools; discuss differences, sort pictures.
- Divide photographs/pictures into past and present, order and place on time line.
- Draw observations from artefacts.
- Butter: discuss picture of churning; try churning own butter in a jar with tight lid on; use creamy milk and shake (for a very long time!).
- Wool: children try carding fleece (on two hairbrushes) and spinning (tie fleece onto pencil with lump of plasticine on the end).
- Fields: looking at old strip-farming map and map with new-style large fields.
- Discuss how strip farming worked - divide up a pretend field between the class members; what might happen if one person didn't look after their land; why do farmers, have huge fields now;
visit some local allotments - how are they arranged? - Changes in food storage: look at examples of modern storage; tins, vacuum packed, freezers, pickle. What happens if we don't store food carefully?
- Try old methods of salting, drying foodstuffs and compare with food which hasn't been treated.
- Jobs on farm: discuss changes, look at pictures of milking in past/milking today. How many people worked on these farms? Harvesting using a sickle v combine harvester.
- Make a poster advertising jobs people used to do.
- Look at works of art from the past from a range of sources showing rural life and farming. What do they tell us?
Resources needed:
- Photographs and pictures of old and modern artefacts
- Pictures of butter making in the past, plastic jar or container, creamy milk
- Fleece (sometimes available from the farm being visited), hairbrushes, pencils, plasticine
- Maps of past and present field systems
- Tins, vacuum-packed items, jars of pickles
- Photos and pictures of milking, harvesting today, people working on farms both past and present