Wind power and cereal boxes

As the school year winds down, some of my favorite activities happen at school!

Second-grade students in the county made terrariums, planting sweet corn, green beans and grass seeds to learn about the water cycle and the difference between monocots and dicots. Families can extend this activity at home by transplanting the corn and green bean plants at home to eat.

Hamilton sixth-grade students learned about wind energy. They worked collaboratively in groups to design turbine blades by choosing the material, number of blades, and shape of their blades and perfecting the pitch to create enough power to lift the most weight in the class.

Dallas City eighth-graders conducted a saturation lab based on the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Center for Agricultural Utilization Center in Peoria. Each group received four unknown substances and had to add water to each until they were saturated. They filled out data tables predicting what each substance was and how many milliliters of water each would hold and described how they looked wet and dry. After each substance was saturated, we added table salt to observe if any change took place. One of the substances was “Super Slurper,” a corn-based product created in 1973 at the ARS lab in Peoria that turns into a gel capable of retaining nearly 2,000 times its weight in moisture.

Southeastern first-grade students learned about corn, how it is planted, grown, and harvested, and the stops it takes after the farm to turn it into a box of cereal that we can purchase at the grocery store to eat. After one student asked a couple of years ago, the students were excited to design their cereal box, and I decided to incorporate that idea into the lesson.

Kindergarten students in the county learned about pigs: how farmers take care of them and keep them safe, what they eat, that they cannot sweat, and that they use mud to prevent sunburns. Each student made a puppet to take home.

The Hancock County Agricultural Literacy Program is in its 26th year of educating students about the importance of agriculture and natural resources. Program facilitators include University of Illinois Extension, Hancock County Farm Bureau, and Hancock County Soil & Water Conservation District.

For more information about the program, please get in touch with Dawn Weinberg at 217-357-2150 or dweinber@illinois.edu.