The Saturday before last was the 40th Annual Children's Festival held by the local parks department and chamber of commerce. Marathon County 4-H had a booth there. Our booth was twofold. The first part of it was a quick and easy craft for youth of all ages. They made what I keep calling "Bug Magnets" even though most of them are flowers. The second part of the booth was a "Choose My Plate" Bean Bag Toss. I created this game after talking with the Nutrition Educators about ideas for something educational. They provided me with some fruit and vegetable shaped bean bags and sent me on my way to find more bean bags and a board. I ended up making three bean bags, a peanut for protein a carton of milk for dairy, and a piece of bread for whole grains. I also ended up making the board. This, however, was easy enough. I just took a tri-fold display board, cut some circles in it, and pasted on the decorations. Originally, we were just going to do the magnets, but I decided that since 4-H is all about education and nutrition, I should do something educational as well. My other problem was that since this was a fair in structure, I wouldn't have each youth for very long. That's why I ended up going to the Nutrition Ladies. I asked them if they had any "Elevator Pitch" activities. The Bean Bag Toss came out of that discussion. Hopefully some of the youth learned something. I know some of them weren't too sure about their fruits and vegetables, so hopefully this helped. Here are some pictures of what we did that day.
It was a really great turn out. We had about 260 youth make the bug magnets, and about 333 youth play our bean bag toss game. I'm looking forward to next year!
At our last YAC meeting we had a pretty good turn out. We did not get to our community service project, which was making dog toys to donate to a food pantry, because the youth were too busy planning. I went ahead with my idea of giving them more responsibility. We went through all the agenda items I needed to be there for, then I left the room. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't leave them with nothing to work with. I gave them a list of everything they needed to talk about, and some forms to fill out with important information. I'm going to stick to their decisions and planning as much as I can. I think this will be a good exercise for the future and future meetings until they can get used to doing things on their own. They will have to learn eventually that in the adult world, you aren't always supervised in everything you do and that sometimes you need to take some responsibility on yourself, and shoulder the consequences as well, good or bad. I don't expect everything they planned to work out perfectly, but live and learn. It will take a few years for some things to take off. I'm looking forward to the next meeting so I can do this again.
Last week Wednesday and Thursday was an awareness fair for community partners at the middle schools here advertising their summer programming for middle schoolers. Our programming includes a Summer Middle School Science Program and the 4-H Gateway Academy (STEM). I talked to many interested pre-teens, so hopefully we get a good crowd.
After last week's after school program, I had to sit down and reevaluate my lesson plans. An hour is not a very long time. Therefore, I had only made it through half of my lesson plan for that day. So this last Thursday, I did the second half of my first lesson. We talked about 4-H and made 4-H bracelets. Next week, we are doing photography. I got out some of the photography curriculum to help me with this. Although I know at least a little about photography, I am not too sure how to teach it. So I'm doing my research. The curriculum is quite helpful with this.
This coming Saturday, I'm making a presentation to one of the 4-H clubs here about giving back to the community and why we should do it. I think I'm going to do the post-it activity with them as well as the Helping Hands activity that I didn't get a chance to do with my afterschool girls.
I think that is everything for now.
Until then!
PS - I know Children of the Corn isn't a cheesy sci-fi flick....maybe I'll start doing cheesy horror flicks instead.
