Farm and animals

Look for good quality

It is hard to find wooden farm buildings and animals! The Amish Toybox looks pretty good, so I shared their images below. After finding only plywood and plastic at my normal online shops, I searched for Amish woodworking. Duchcrafters also looked nice, but their images are too fuzzy to share.

The farm will be a staple piece of your home classroom for years because we use it for everything from simple labeling to learning parts of speech.

The farm, animals, and vehicles are for both girls and boys. Please do ignore the Amish segregation in this regard.

If your child would like to paint the wooden animals, this is fine. Supply safe watercolor paints and multiple sets of animals because we need sizes and colors to be different.

This guy is great. A solid wood barn is best. Try to avoid plywood/MDF when possible. You can also make a small clay structure or lean-to for the animals.

I recommend wooden animals because most of the farm animal toys are made from plastic — BPA, BPF, BPS, and PVC are all dangerous.

BPA-free is a lie by omission as the BPF and BPS substitutes can be even more dangerous. This is well-established. There is an industry working group of manufacturers dedicated to searching for non-endocrine disrupting plastics. They’ll let us know when they get there.

Before you shop online, check out wooden Montessori products on Alibaba, the Chinese-founded global manufacturer’s site, so that you do not end up paying for “handmade” only to get factory made. There is nothing wrong with a well-run factory, but I want to know what I am buying.

Check out the Cal Earth project for barn inspiration, too!