Kendel Hayden understands that quite a few men and women do not fully grasp how considerably farmers supply for the typical inhabitants, even in a rural community like Owensboro.
That is why she incorporates agriculture in as quite a few of her social scientific studies classes at the Owensboro Innovation Center Faculty, and for her attempts, she has been awarded the Kentucky Farm Bureau Excellence Ag Literacy Award.
The award is developed to understand and reward educators who include agriculture curriculum in core experiments. All preschool through 12th quality instructors are eligible for the award, according to the KFB.
Hayden did not mature up on a farm, but her spouse farms, and now it’s their complete environment, she said.
She incorporates agriculture into quite a few of her classes, from discussions on early mankind and how farming discoveries improved the life of hunter-gatherer societies, to irrigation and conservation. There are normally lessons inside social studies that lead back to agriculture, she mentioned.
“We also designed elevated beds, and we talked about crop rotation,” she stated. “Last spring we uncovered how to be resourceful and reuse plants when we grew heads of lettuce and ended up capable to feed the entire college. We applied the lettuce for salads, and dressings for hamburgers, and tacos.”
She stated pupils relished that “cut and occur again” solution to farming.
“I’m attempting to educate the young ones to be resourceful,” she said, introducing that some of her students weren’t even conscious that environmentally friendly beans grew on a plant. “I still have some youngsters who assume vegetables appear from cans at the grocery retail store.”
That’s why it’s so vital to incorporate agriculture understanding and assignments in every day main articles curriculum, she reported.
Not each pupil has developed up on a farm, and not each individual student knows how gardens mature and how farmers feed the world, she claimed.
“It’s up to us to instruct that,” she said.
Her KFB award included $500, which Hayden reported she strategies to donate again to iMiddle. She would like to invest in the college an indoor improve tower, which will allow her to train college students about hydroponics.
She also has a aspiration of the university acquiring a greenhouse just one day, so that learners can increase their very own seedlings and vegetation from seeds.
“We are seeking a large greenhouse so we can be totally self-adequate,” she reported. “I feel that will seriously help present the pupils with the entire ‘farm-to-table’ working experience.”
As a state KFB winner, Hayden has been invited to go to the Nationwide Ag in the Classroom conference that will get place in Saratoga Springs, New York at the close of June. There she will hook up with other educators from across the region to learn about how they are incorporating ag classes in their faculty day, something Hayden is most enthusiastic to working experience.
