We live in the countryside, surrounded by farm land. The kid I was reading to was obsessed with farms from the moment he could point at one. He could name the animal sounds before he could string a sentence together. So Old MacDonald Had A Farm was one of his earliest favorite nursery rhymes.
The trouble with the song was that he would pick one animal and demand we repeat the same verse over and over. Any suggestion of a different animal was met with a small two-year-old protest. I made the Old MacDonald’s Farm Busy Bag to give the choice back to the rhyme.
A busy bag is a small, contained kit you can pull out anywhere. Library waiting room, in-laws’ kitchen table, a long car trip. Everything for one activity fits inside a single small box, ready to go. This one took an evening to put together and the kid did most of the assembly himself.
What goes in the bag:
- Six to ten wooden coffee stirrers, the flat-spoon kind. The disposable ones from a takeout coffee counter work perfectly. Plain craft-store wooden stirrers work too.
- A sheet of farm animal stickers, one sticker per spoon. Pig, cow, horse, sheep, chicken, duck, dog, goat are the easy starters.
- A printed farmyard backdrop, A4 size, with a barn, a pond, a fence, and a field. A free coloring sheet from a children’s activity site works fine. (I am not an illustrator. Printed paper is the friend.)
- A small box with a lid to keep it all in. A recycled jewelry box, a small craft tin, or a cleaned takeout container works.
The kid did the making. He picked one wooden stirrer, peeled a sticker off the sheet, and pressed it onto the rounded end of the spoon. I showed him how to push the sticker down properly so it would not lift. He used the smaller teaspoon-style stirrers for the small animals (chickens, ducks) and the larger spoons for the bigger animals. Fine motor practice woven into the build. Once the spoons were ready he decorated the outside of the storage box with the leftover stickers, which gave him ownership of the whole kit.
Singing through the spoons
We laid the farmyard picture in the middle of the kitchen table and put the box of finished spoons within his reach. The rule was simple: at the start of each verse, the kid closed his eyes, reached into the box, and pulled out a spoon. Whichever animal came out was the verse we sang. After the verse, the spoon went on the farmyard picture wherever the kid thought that animal should live. The pig went near the barn, the duck near the pond, the sheep in the field. The horse, in his version, lived on the roof of the barn because horses are tall.
The random pick was the part that solved the original problem. He could not fix on the same animal because he could not see which spoon was coming. It was the same surprise-and-reveal that already worked for him in Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell, the lift-the-flap book where each animal is hidden behind a paper door; we ended up building our Dear Zoo Small World around that same idea. After about three verses he started predicting which animals were still in the box, which turned out to be a sneaky bit of process-of-elimination practice. By the time the box was empty the picture had a full farm on it and he had sung Old MacDonald six or seven times without complaining about repetition.
Everything fits back inside the box at the end. We have taken this one to grandparents’ kitchens, a long ferry crossing, and the back of a play café when food was taking too long. The whole kit is the size of a small paperback. The kid often pulls it out himself now and runs a one-person Old MacDonald round at the kitchen table, and on a flat afternoon when even the spoons have lost their novelty, our animal coloring pages get pulled out for the same farm cast in printable form.
The version of this we use now has thirteen spoons. We added a goat, a turkey, a rooster (distinct from the chicken), a goose, and an elderly farm dog the kid named after a real one he met. The rhyme is the same; the animal list grows whenever he wants to add a verse.