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Farm out
By DONNA WINCHESTER, Times Staff Writer
LARGO -- Justin Simpson listened closely to Pinellas County extension agent Cindy Peacock as she outlined the steps for growing tomatoes to his fifth-grade class. He nodded when she named the different varieties -- cherry, plum, beefsteak -- remembering that his teacher at Shore Acres Elementary School had covered that information a few weeks earlier. Then he waited patiently for his turn at a large tub filled with soil. After using a trowel to add some of the soil to a small plastic pot, he turned his palm up to receive a few tiny round white seeds from Peacock. He carefully placed the seeds just below the soil's surface. He patted the dirt with his fingertips and then gently misted it with water from a plastic spray bottle. "I don't have a green thumb," the 11-year-old admitted, recounting a tale about grapes that sprouted and then died. "But I've got a partial green thumb. I can grow some things." Justin and his classmates from Shore Acres, 1800 62nd Ave. NE in St. Petersburg, were among nearly 800 elementary schoolchildren from seven schools who visited Florida Botanical Gardens last week for 4-H Pizza Garden: An Agricultural Adventure. Hosted by the Pinellas County Extension Service and the 4-H Department of the University of Florida, the two-day program was part of a curriculum designed for classroom teachers by Pinellas County 4-H agent Janet Harper. Harper, who has a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in management, realized that most children know very little about Florida agriculture when she visited a school for the Great American Teach-In a few years ago. She decided to write the pizza garden curriculum to help them learn where their food comes from and what is involved in bringing it to their tables. "It's important for kids, particularly in an urban area such as ours, to learn that their food doesn't just appear in the supermarket, that it originates from the land," Harper said. "We try to concentrate on the products they use on a daily basis. They soon learn that nearly everything they eat has to be grown." She designed 4-H Pizza Garden: An Agricultural Adventure as a series of eight lessons that begin with an overview of careers in the agricultural industry. Subsequent lessons cover different aspects of the process that results in a pizza, such as dairy farming, wheat production and vegetable growing. The field trip comes after the children have mastered the lessons in the classroom. It is optional, Harper said, but it adds another dimension to what students learn from the instructional material. "Our big focus is hands-on learning," she said. "If a child touches something, feels something, tastes something, they're going to remember it better than if they're told something." The students rotated among eight workshops, including the tomato-growing workshop. They visited with a dairy goat at one stop, learned the history of cheese, and watched a cheesemaking demonstration. They were introduced to a beef steer at another workshop and discovered that many familiar items, such as chewing gum, mayonnaise and glue, are all beef byproducts. They learned about the importance of water in agriculture and made a sample watershed in another workshop, using a graham cracker as the base, a candy Kiss for a mountain, chocolate icing for soil, and green and blue icing for grass and water. Several children said their favorite part of the day was getting to eat their watersheds. The pizza garden curriculum is one of several Harper has developed for teachers. Like the others, it incorporates lessons in mathematics, social studies, language arts and science, and aligns with the Florida Sunshine State Standards, the educational benchmarks used for competency assessment in the public school system. It also helps teachers target life skills such as critical thinking, observation and communication skills. Shore Acres fifth-grade teacher Paul Walters decided to try the pizza garden curriculum after successfully using Harper's Food Fundamentals curriculum earlier in the school year. Designed to teach students about nutrition, including daily food choices, simple food preparation and the relationship between diet and fitness, the nutrition program brought the lessons presented in the students' health textbook to life, she said. The students were especially intrigued by an assignment asking them to keep track of their food consumption for three days. They made a list of everything they ate, including snacks, then wrote essays and discussed their results with their classmates. "At least 40 percent said they needed more fruits and vegetables in their diets," Walters said. "They didn't realize it until after the lesson." The fifth-graders spent weeks preparing for the pizza garden field trip. Using seeds provided by the extension service, they planted an herb garden with marjoram, basil and thyme and graphed their growth each week. They priced different types of meat that could be used on a pizza, such as ham and pepperoni, by making phone calls to grocery stores and meat markets. They also studied the labels on cheese packages they found in the grocery store, calculating the approximate number of fat grams they would consume if they ate two slices of pizza. "I don't think they realized they were doing math," Walters said. "We reviewed measurements and percentages without them knowing we were doing a math lesson." After the field trip, the children reviewed the materials Harper stuffed into "goody bags" for them to take back to the classroom, including information from the Florida Department of Agriculture. Several of them also took the information home to share with their parents, a practice Harper said 4-H has encouraged since it began in 1902. "4-H started because a lot of adults didn't have time to learn new things," she said. "One of the things we try to promote is the idea of passing this information on. You teach the kids and they take it back to the family." To learn more For more information about curriculum prepared for classroom teachers by Pinellas County 4-H agent Janet Harper, call 582-2100 or visit http://coop.co.pinellas.fl.us.
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