Wakulla County Classrooms Experience Ag Adventures Day in Quincy

Sherri Hood
Family and Consumer Sciences / 4-H
Wakulla County
sjhood@ufl.edu

For the lucky 209 third, fourth and fifth graders who got to attend the Ag Adventures field trip this month, the planning started in June when their teachers attended a training workshop sponsored by the Wakulla County 4-H Program and Florida Ag in the Classroom . Teachers from Medart Elementary, Crawfordville Elementary, COAST Charter School, Wakulla Christian and Riversink Elementary participated and learned about how to incorporate teaching about agriculture in their classrooms by using the Ag in the Classroom curriculum. Among the lessons were those involving growing conditions for plants in certain soils and performing soil chemistry demonstrations. The rain cycle and how it affects agriculture and food crop production was taught as well as a tutorial on beneficial insects and pollinators for gardening. Teachers also received many classroom teaching materials and ideas to use when they began school in August

As a follow-up to their training, each of the 10 participating classrooms was given permission to have a classroom garden at their school. The Florida Ag in the Classroom grant funded through the Wakulla County 4-H office paid for the purchase of bricks, soil, seeds, gardening gloves for each student as well as several hand-gardening tools. These gardens have been established and students have already begun germinating seeds for winter greens and other vegetables to be planted in their gardens this fall. They also plan to plant spring vegetable and flower gardens as well.

The most exciting highlight of the Ag in the Classroom experience to date was by far the field day that students got to attend in Quincy. According to the students, parents and teachers who attended, it was “the best field trip ever” and “the kids had so much fun and learned more than I ever thought they would.” The 4-H Agent has been stopped in the grocery store and told that “my child came home talking about everything from that field trip and they loved it!” Jeannie Brodhead from COAST Charter School said the kids “raved about this field trip and all of the other kids are so jealous.” While at the North Florida Research and Education Center in Quincy, Florida, students were invited to rotate through five crop stations and observe a field soil pit. The stations included cotton/soybeans, peanuts, corn, pumpkins and squash and pollination. While visiting the five stations, students heard from researchers about each crop, got to see the crop in the field, got to sample food and items made from each crop and even got to run through a corn maze!

Wakulla County 4-H is proud to have been able to be a part of this unique learning experience for our students and would like to thank the following for their generous support of this program through their cooperative partnerships, monetary support and donations: Wakulla County School Board, Farm Credit of Northwest Florida, Florida Farm Bureau, Winn Dixie, The Wakulla Soil and Water Conservation District, Florida Ag in the Classroom, and the University of Florida North Florida Research and Education Center.

For more information on how to be a part of Wakulla County 4-H, please contact 4-H Agent Sherri Hood at the Wakulla County Extension Office by phone at 926-3931 or by email at sjhood@ufl.edu