Agricultural Literacy with 21^st Century 

The Marion County Extension Office is a partner with the 21^st Century program which is an after-school program that is available to school aged youth in Marion County. At this program the youth receive homework help, extra practice on weak subjects and get a lesson from our office over a variety of different topics.  

Every month I attend 21^st Century and teach students about agriculture literacy topics using Kentucky Farms Feeds Me passport activity. Using the Kentucky Farms Feeds Me content, I created my own version of the passport to add in activities and hands-on learning experiments. The passport is composed of 12 activities ranging from Agriculture in Marion County to going on virtual field trips to several Kentucky farms and learning about specific agriculture enterprises our state has. 

My goal with the Passport activity is to make sure students are being taught agriculture is more than just learning the basics of where your foods comes from, and agriculture is an industry that is always changing and benefits everyone. Students are asked to complete an activity before we start the lesson to document what they know about the topic prior to the lesson and answer questions after the lesson to show what they learned. Students then do something hands on ranging from making a craft, conducting an experiment, or simply completing a matching activity that corresponds to the lesson. For out first lesson, we learned about agriculture in Marion County. Students were asked to identity what animals and crops they know comes from our county. We also identified where Marion County is located on a state map of Kentucky and how many farms our county has. After the lesson, students colored all the agriculture commodities in our county, cut and pasted them on to a printout of Marion County. This reiterated what ag commodities we have and how they are found all over the county where we live. 

This program has made an impact on 40 school aged youth in Marion County. 10 African American, 8 White and 22 Hispanic students.