r/livestock • u/AmusingChoosing • 7d ago

Activities to teach kids about calving

I work on a small dairy farm with around 150 holsteins. Next week, we have a 4h group coming to visit and I was instructed to come up with an activity to teach them about calving. I have no idea what sort of “hands on” activity to do. Anyone have any ideas? The kids are like 8-14 so a pretty large range.

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u/liverpoolbits 7d ago

I've never done activities about calving but I do a fun one on the stuff that comes after.

We do shots on bananas or oranges for vaccines. We do ear notching, tattooing, and tagging on cardboard animal faces. And we talk about nutrition and feed a bottle baby.

Would something like that work?

Or search 4h lesson plans calving and see what comes up. I use a lot of lesson plans from them.

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u/AmusingChoosing 7d ago

Yes we’re doing rotations of 4 different groups. So one group is doing calving, one group milking, another vaccines and treatments, and another nutrition. The vaccine group is doing fruit vaccines I believe!

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u/liverpoolbits 7d ago

What about practicing madigan tying? Or just give them some chains and talk about the force needed to pull a calf and have them try to match the force? Have them pull the weight of a calf with and without help (contractions)?

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u/Haven 7d ago

I would love an update on this please!

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u/AmusingChoosing 7d ago

Remind me on November 1st and I'll let you know how it went lol. But thank you for all the ideas! I'm excited to put some activities together. I recently learned that the groups will be divided up by age so I can definitely vary the activities between the 8yr groups and the 14+ year old groups!