Success StoryIn-School 4-H Clubs Teach Core Content and Curriculum Simultaneously
In-School 4-H Clubs Teach Core Content and Curriculum Simultaneously
Author: Kimberly Ragland
Planning Unit: Boyle County CES
Major Program: 4-H Youth Development Programming
Plan of Work: Acquisition of Life Skills
Outcome: Initial Outcome
Boyle County 4-H has a long tradition of working with local schools to provide educational content to students while sharing the breadth of extracurricular 4-H offerings available to them using an in-class club format. Local 4-H leaders strongly support the efforts of professional 4-H staff in classroom settings as these linkages provide the best marketing opportunity of other 4-H offerings to early 4-H age youth. Teachers and schools welcome the 4-H program into their classrooms because “lessons” are provided as part of club content that are consistent with the Kentucky Department of Education’s Core Content for Assessment. Cooperative Extension Service personnel, in cooperation with local teachers, created 48 classroom clubs in the 2019-20 school year in the Danville, Boyle County, and Danville Christian systems. CES provided educators, curricula, core content checklists, and materials for five- or six-monthly meetings for each club (truncated by COVID). Lessons were offered in the areas of natural resources (4th grade), citizenship (5th grade), communications (6th grade) and earth science (7th grade) as chosen by teachers. All clubs elected officers using the democratic process, all candidates presented speeches before the class, and elected officers conducted the meetings using formal business meeting structure throughout the year. The arrival of the pandemic in March 2020, prevented administration of a full evaluation of the program with students. However, an informal polling of teachers indicated 100% were interested in returning 4-H to the classroom when permissible and 100% believed the 4-H experience and content improved the skills and knowledge of their students.
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