Thursday, March 8, 2012

Classroom Ag Updates

I brought in some samples of grain and feed from my family's farm and passed them around to both my classes of 4th grade science students.  The samples included: corn, soybeans, oats, alfalfa, ground alfalfa, ground hay, ground corn stalks, straw, corn silage, mineral, salt, lamb creep feed, ground corn (pig feed), chicken feed crumbles, soy hull pellets, Distillers Dry Grains (DDGs), and show feed.  They were obviously the highlight of the lesson:

"The most interesting thing is how the corn kernel gets bigger."
"That in Iowa the corn is grown a lot."
"My favorite part was smelling the bags of stuff. I smelled it.  It smelled good."
"I liked how we got to smell the corn and wheat." (I think he meant oats)
"My fav. was learning how the food smells."
"Smelling all the feed."
"Animals' food are good smelling."

In today's lesson, we covered farm machinery.  I showed a video from YouTube with a combine harvesting corn and soybeans.  I also covered a bit about veterinaries; the visual aids were most helpful!  They loved seeing the x-rays of animal insides and broken bones.  We didn't have a lot of time left at the end of the day... it's pretty obvious based on what was written on their post-it notes:

"Watching the video about harvesting."
"The videos and the x-rays."
"Implant gun."
"Corn hair [corn silk]."
"That you stick a hand up a cow's butt." (referring to the long sleeved plastic glove I showed them)
"I liked learning about the pigs (pig puller) because my neighbors have pigs so I like to learn about them."

We'll find out tomorrow what the other class has to say.

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