My kids have both loved the game Peekaboo Barn-affiliate link because it’s fun to be surprised each time the barn door opens to reveal a new farm animal (almost as good as opening a present from Old MacDonald himself :). So to keep the surprises going I made a free printable barn with farm animals to go inside like cows, horses, and pigs. The printable comes in two levels–one that will help them learn letters, phonics, and practice identifying first letters, and the other level will help children learn how to sound out words and read the names of 13 different animals who live on the farm.
You may also like your free Farm Friends Activity Pack.
Peek a Boo Farm Animal Activity
Little Dragon named the animal and then opened the barn door to see the letter inside. Since he is learning his letters I included uppercase and lowercase letters so he can learn to identify them. If he didn’t know the letter I would name it for him and then we would make the letter sound. The printable also comes with a set with dotted letters so kids can practice tracing the letters too. I’m thinking next year Little Tiger will be able to use the dashed lines–kids learn so fast!
Little Tiger practiced sounding out the letters to discover who was in the barn. I was so impressed when she made the double O sound like in the word Goose and the double E sound like in the word Sheep. There are so many different sounds letters can make!
You may notice that the printable has 2 cards for the same picture of a chicken and I did that because a chicken can also be called a hen and some kids aren’t ready to learn diagraphs but I couldn’t leave Old Macdonad’s Farm chickenless so Hen it is… and Chicken it will be when we work on beginning diagraphs :).
To prep the activity print out the barn. The printable comes with two versions depending on how much ink you want to use (one has a background as shown in the photographs and one is just the barn). Cut the barn door open along the dashed line and at the bottom of the page. Fold the barn door so it can open and close.
Print the animals and cut them out. You may want to laminate the parts of this printable and/or use cardstock.
To do the activity place the cards inside the barn and have child guess what is behind the barn door by either naming the animals beginning letter (H is for horse) or by reading the word and then opening the bard door to find the animal (a Horse is in the barn).
In the photos you will see black dots below the letters but the printable does not include the dots because Little Tiger found them to be not helpful so if you like the dot idea you can just quickly add them in with a black marker.
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KEEP THE FUN GOING WITH THESE GREAT IDEAS!
