2011 Holiday Gift Ideas

Friday, June 26, 2009

Teachers learn how to teach agriculture

Lessons aim to help students think about their sources of food
By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah Tribune reporter
June 26, 2009

Kids might bite into a strawberry topped with whipped cream, but few know how the fruit grows or how to pick it.Similarly, the "Got milk?" ad campaign emphasizes the benefits of drinking milk, but how many kids know that the average cow produces 90 gallons or more of the white stuff a day? Or that a pig farm can birth 75 to 80 piglets a week?

Teachers such as Gail Sanders want to change how young people think about farming and food, if they do at all, and learned some ways during a four-day course offered through Aurora University and the DuPage County Farm Bureau. Sanders, an 8th-grade science instructor at Monroe Middle School in Wheaton, plans to use some of the plant propagation techniques she was shown during a field trip to Cantigny Park in Wheaton.

"There are so many things our kids in the suburbs don't know about how we get food on the table," she said, adding that most of her students had never seen a strawberry plant when she took one to class last spring.

Read more:

No comments:

Post a Comment