If you plan to introduce a collection of toy animals to your students during an "Old MacDonald" unit, you'll need somewhere to store them all. Start with a shoe box and an empty cylindrical oatmeal box, and you'll have the basis for a barn and silo storage space. Cover the boxes with red construction paper and use strips of white paper and markers to add detail. Cover the lids separately so you can take them off and place toy animals inside. This project helps you teach your students about where on a farm each animal lives and gives you a chance to talk to them about how the animals contribute to the farm.
Challenge your young students to use everyday items to make representations of animals that live in Old MacDonald's Farm. Offer them paper plates and cups, scissors, construction paper, paints, crayons, markers and other craft material to use to make their animals. The end of a paper cup becomes a pig snout, or yellow yarn a chicken's feathers in the hands of an imaginative child. Divide the students into groups and have each make a collection of paper plate animal faces, such as a cow, pig, chicken and horse, using their supplies. Cut out eyes and some yarn turn these into masks.
Paper bags and colored cutouts of animals are the ingredients for Old MacDonald puppets. Provide your students with a collection of coloring pages that feature farm animals. After the children color in the pages, they can cut out the animals then glue them to paper bags to use as puppets. Or for another option, provide students with an array of craft materials and encourage them to design their own animal puppets. For instance, white packing peanuts become sheep's wool, wrinkled pink construction paper takes on the texture of a pig's skin and brown yarn makes a horse's mane. At the end of the lesson, students can use their puppets to act out the "Old MacDonald" song.
Vanilla frosting tinted with food coloring and a base of graham crackers on a platter enable the children students to make an edible Old MacDonald's farm. Students use their fingers or a craft stick to paint some graham crackers with blue frosting, some with green and some with red to represent farm buildings. Make fences out of straight pretzel sticks broken into smaller pieces and add animal cracker cookies to the farm. Miniature marshmallows make tiny clouds in the blue sky.