Day camp helps children learn about agriculture while students practice teaching skills

Sounds of children learning, playing games and giggling filled Northwest Missouri State University’s Agricultural Learning Center this week as agricultural education majors hosted their second annual Ag Camp.

About 150 children – spanning ages 5 through 10 and coming from locations throughout northwest Missouri and southwest Iowa – attended the camp during three afternoons.

“Ag feeds us, ag clothes us, ag makes sure that we live every single day,” said Emma Brushwood, a senior from Elsberry, Missouri, who helped launch the camp last year and led it again this summer. “I just want the kids to know where everything they use every single day comes from.”

Using a classroom-based curriculum provided by Agriculture Education on the Move, Brushwood and four other agricultural education majors who are summer interns with the program led children through activities that taught them about crops, animals and other aspects of the field.

On Tuesday, campers created soybean germination necklaces and made plastic from a combination of cornstarch, water and oil. On Wednesday, campers learned about feed rations by creating a snack mix with varied cereals and Skittles and then studying the amount of fats, proteins, sugars and vitamins within the mix. Campers also made butter, examined the parts of a hard-boiled egg, and they put on blindfolds to try pinning a tail on a cardboard pig or placing horns on a paper goat head.

During the final day of the camp on Thursday, they got close-up looks at a calf, goats, pigs and sheep to reinforce some of the things they learned. Across the parking lot, they saw large farm equipment, including tractors, balers, a corn treater and a semi-truck while discussing potential careers in agriculture.

Katijo Schaefer, a sophomore from Glasgow, Missouri, also is an Agriculture Education on the Move intern this summer and taught the curriculum at elementary schools in Columbia, Missouri, before helping with the Northwest Ag Camp.

“I have a passion for teaching young minds, especially about agriculture,” said Schaefer, who was raised on a row crop farm with beef cattle and goats. “It holds a very special part in my heart.”

Schaefer said she enjoyed leading the hands-on activities while honing her classroom management skills.

“Getting the experience of hands-on activities and kind of running with what is thrown at me – because every class is different, every age group is different – you have to really try to develop more ideas and different activities for each one,” she said.

Meghan Hunerdosse, a senior from Indianola, Iowa, who helped lead the camp with Brushwood last year, returned this summer as one of seven student volunteers to assist the interns.

“It was so much fun when Emma and I did it last summer, and I just knew we wanted to make it bigger and better,” Hunerdosse said. “We definitely achieved that.”

The camp also benefited this year from the generous support of more than two dozen local businesses, organizations and individuals. Their donations and sponsorships allowed the children to attend the camp for free and leave with goodies such as a camp T-shirt and coupons for treats like ice cream.

Brushwood estimated about half of the children attending the camp come from families who do not farm or don’t have a strong connection to agriculture.

“I hope that they are just falling in love with agriculture even more,” Hunerdosse said. “A lot of them do come from an ag background, but some of them don’t, and we hope we kind of pique their interests through agriculture a little bit.”

Brushwood added, “It's just a little spark that lights inside of me whenever kids learn something.”