Junior Field Trip

It wasn’t until this morning that I finally clued in that the month of June is nearly over! This term has just been flying by; I am SO far behind in everything, especially marking and report cards are coming up just around the corner! Ahh!

On a positive note I was finally able to take my class on a field trip to the farm. At the end of last term and the beginning of this one we were studying community helpers and ‘farmers’ were the last on the list. I had hoped to do a trip to the farm to find out “what farmers do” way back at the beginning of term, but plans kept falling through. However on Thursday morning I was informed that we were able to go if we went that afternoon! Despite the short notice I figured “it’s now or never” so the trip was put in motion. The 3 & 4 class joined as well as Mrs. Towse and her 2 preschool aged children. So in all we had 39 kids and 4 adults.

When we arrived Mr. Pete Fisher showed the children how they process grain (mostly corn) to make food pellets for the animals and meale-meal (cornmeal) for selling. They kids even got to try some of the pellets which some of them actually enjoyed! (yuck!) After this his son, Mr. Chris took us around to see the various animals. We got to see some cows being milked; many of the students were shocked to discover that this is where the milk comes from that we drink every day and put on our cereal. :) From there we went to visit the pigs. The boar stood nearly as tall as some of my grade ones! The kids preferred watching the new piglets, the youngest ones were only a week old and were still quite cute. We also got to see the ‘porkers’ (as Chris referred to them) which are the pigs who are raised simply for meat. On our way we saw the ‘sheep infirmary’, the pen where any sick sheep or those needing extra care (pregnant etc). I have to say that this was one day I was thankful for my cold as my sense of smell was pretty much nil so I wasn’t able to enjoy any of the wonderful odours!
From the ‘porkers we walked up to see the young and old bulls. On our way we passed a very lonely looking old horse; they only have one left now. There were some rather interesting questions about the bulls brought up by some of the students but I think they were all answered rather tactfully.

Over all we had a great trip. The kids had fun and actually learned some stuff at the same time. :) mission accomplished! (I’ve posted some pics on facebook