I can still remember the year that my grade five class entered a community scarecrow building competition, and the hours that I spent stuffing straw into old stockings to make our life sized friend. The memory of what we won is long gone, but I don't think I will ever forget the fun that we had. Although I have never ever actually seen a "real" scarecrow in a field, since that year scarecrows have been synonymous with fall in my mind. It was fitting that our momstown theme for October was "scarecrows", and I got to reexperience all things scarecrow with a new generation of kids.
A great way to start a scarecrow unit is with a shape scarecrow craft. This activity allows kids to express their creativity and work on their fine motor skills as they glue together the pieces. It also provides an excellent opportunity to introduce or reinforce the names of basic shapes such as squares, rectangles, and circles. As an added bonus, the finished product would be an adorable classroom decorations to display for the duration of the unit, and it's a great way to use up scraps of construction paper. Here's what you need to make your own shape scarecrow:
Shape Scarecrow Supplies:
- One 6.5cm by 12cm green construction paper rectangle
- One 3.5cm by 17cm green construction paper rectangle
- One 2.5cm by 12cm blue construction paper rectangle
- Six 1cm wide yellow construction paper rectangles, cut to various lengths between 7cm and 12cm
- One 3cm by 3cm yellow construction paper square
- One 1cm by 1cm orange construction paper square
- One 15cm diameter beige construction paper circle
- Two black 2cm diameter black construction paper circles
- One sheet of construction paper to glue the scarecrow onto
- One glue stick
- One black marker
- Have older kids cut out the shapes needed for the craft. Precut them for smaller children, or if time is a concern.
- Glue beige circle to the centre of the page. Glue eyes and nose on top of circle.
- Glue 3.5cm by 17 cm green rectangle over the top portion of the scarecrow's face. Glue 6.5cm by 12cm green rectangle just over the top of the first green rectangle to form a hat shape.
- Glue blue rectangle over hat to form the hat band. Glue yellow square on top of blue rectangle.
- Glue yellow rectangles onto the scarecrow's face, near the hat, to make straw hair.
- Use a black marker to draw a face on your scarecrow.
A momstown theme would not be complete with books, and momstown has a great round up scarecrow books to choose from. We particularly enjoyed "The Scarecrow's Hat" by Ken Brown, and "I’m A Dingle Dangle Scarecrow" by Annie Kuebler. We were also fortunate to get to read "Story County" by Derek Anderson through momstown's partnership with Scholastic Canada. Story County is a cute book about a farmer and his four animal friends, and their attempt to built a farm in one day. While you might expect that it would be the farmer who would do the majority of the work, in this case it is the pig, chicken, and dog who take the lead on building, painting, and sowing the seeds, while the farmer does silly things like eat the jelly beans that he had purchased to plant, and Miss Cow tries to help by engaging in tasks such as putting lipstick on the scarecrow and plowing the field in high heels. Together with the its bright, imaginative illustrations full of extra little jokes and things to spot, the book had us all laughing, and thinking about the different sorts of scarecrows we could make too. If you can make a princess scarecrow with lipstick, why not a pirate, or even a dinosaur scarecrow? We are so thankful to Scholastic Canada for the wonderful books they provide us to read and share every month.
To round out our scarecrow theme, we sang scarecrow songs and rhymes together too. Here are a few of our favourites:
I'm a Little Scarecrow (sung to the tune of |"I’m a Little Teapot")
I'm a little scarecrow,
In the corn
I wear a hat,
And a shirt that's torn.
When the crows fly by,
I wave and shout,
"Leave the field and get on out!"
Five Stuffed Scarecrows (fingerplay)
Five Stuffed Scarecrows in the corn rows,
The first one said, "You go away, crows!"
The second one said, "I am very small,"
The third one said, "I am standing tall."
The fourth one said, "On my head is a hat."
The fifth one said, “By my post flies a bat"
Five stuffed scarecrows in the corn rows,
Moving left and right as the autumn wind blows
The Flippy Floppy Scarecrow (sung to the tune of “ The Itsy Bitsy Spider”)
The floppy, floppy scarecrow
Stands in the field all day
His job is to scare the birds away.
Up on a pole as high as he can be
And away fly those black crows,
1-2-3
Scarecrows, Apples, Pumpkin Pie (chant)
Scarecrows, apples, pumpkin pie
If you hear me, just say "HI!"
Scarecrows, apples, pumpkin pie
If you hear me, just say "BYE!"
[For the first verse, have kids hide under scarves, under chairs, behind their hands etc., and pop out on "hi". For the second verse, have kids hide on "bye"]
November is all about the wild west, so come and join us for a stampede of fun.
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