All About Cowboys Activities for Preschool Desert or Farm Theme

Our first week of Discover the Desert preschool theme was All About Cowboys. Some of our learning objectives this week included: explaining why cowboys wear boots, name items that could be found in a desert environment, discuss the uses of a cowboy’s rope and what can be caught with it, mimic the way a horse moves, and identify types of animals at a rodeo.

The planning overview for Discover the Desert theme:

Daily topic pages (for days 1-4). We also covered “rodeo”.

Cowboy Boots

Square dancing! How awesome is this?! We had so much exploring the square shape. My group all knows what a square is but square dancing? That was new! We made a square out of masking tape on the floor. We did some free dancing but then I introduced them to the idea of a simple square dance.

See our square dancing video!

Then, using our nametags, we learned about the syallables in each name. Pretending we had cowboy boots on, we stomped out the syllables in each child’s name. It’s super fun and effective! See the video below.

Then we did a “boot toss” game. Instead of using a cowboy boot to toss the balls into, we used this basket, which is similar in concept. It was fun, challenging and yet they were able to make the basket and be successful.

To futher explore learning about cowboy boots, we used pokey balls to paint a paper boot shape. This is process art. Each child choose a color or combination of colors to paint with. Using the ball, they made texture marks or painted with the ball. The color combinations were beautiful!

Painting with a pokey ball includes a sensory experience as art usually does. It works on those fine motor skills too.

After the paint dried, many choose to add details with crayon. Crayon over paint is a nice effect!

Cowboy Hat

Day 2 was Cowboy Hat day. We started with the Skip Around the Hat song.

We made cowboy hat headbands. They were painted by dragging a piece of rope in paint and across the paper. We glued the rope on as decoration when the paint dried.

We played cowboy hat color matching games. One game matched the colors of hats and boots. We also used the hats to play a matching game.

Lasso

Day 3 we learned about lassos. Click here to read about lassos.

Horse & At the Rodeo

Days 4 & 5 topics were Horse & At the Rodeo. We galloped like horses, made horse puppets, played with horses, counted horses with the horse counters, tossed horseshoes, and watched some barrel racing videos.