A social club in Dubai named Hands on Club who arranges educative and fun activities for kids announced a dairy farm visit a few weeks back. How can I miss this kids eco-activity, so I and my son joined many other kids and their moms to visit Marmum Dairy farm situated close to Nad al Sheba. We all traveled through mini school buses, we got to spot camels in dessert on the way. All older kids were very curious and had a few interesting ideas about cows like ‘cows drink milk first before giving us milk’ and ‘do cows eat chocolates to make chocolate milk?’ :-). You could imagine how entertaining it must be to be there with those smart kids!

Marmum farm allowed us in after their routine cleansing procedures. From a viewing gallery, we could see automated cow milk extraction procedure. There was an informative presentation arranged for our group by Marmum. Where they explained many facts about cows, dairy farm activities, procedures etc. Older kids were happy to know real answers to their curious questions, but not my toddler. He wanted to ‘go out’ of that hall and he announced it almost as soon as the presentation started! To avoid disturbing others, me and my son wandered around, the main attraction was calves kept nearby. My son wanted to feed them a lot of things like dried leaves and dried sticks of trees. But he understood after I explained that like all other babies calf need milk too because it is cow’s baby. Of course, we returned to the hall when old MacDonald song started at end of a presentation, it is our one of the favorite song!

Marmum arranged calf feeding for kids. Kids fed the calves milk through large bottles. It was definitely the highlight of the visit. Kids were happy and shouting and gathering around calves. One of the calves set itself free from that cage like shelter and jumped around, it made kids scream even louder and poor calf got scared even more. The farm staff caught the calf and kept in its safe zone. Many mothers told their kids not to scream and disturb the calf further. I found that incidence educative too, our kids need to make aware that they are disturbing animals in their excitement. Which can irritate those animals and they might harm us (of course not in this situation, the poor calf was frightened and was trying to get away from the crowd).

Marmum provided us with lots and lots of bottles of milk, juices, Laban. It was a hot day and cold strawberry milk was much needed for us.

It was a fun-filled, educative activity and all kids enjoyed it thoroughly. My son now knows where the milk comes from. And now I know many things about a cow which before this visit I didn’t even give a thought to.

Read here about some other interesting places in UAE where you can take your children for some fun and educational trips.

And here are some eco-activity ideas for pre-schooler.

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