Teaching first graders that chickens aren’t just “weird little birds on the farm” was a key goal for sophomore Blake LaPean when he started writing a children’s story.
“I’m an agriculturalist myself,” he said.
LaPean is a student in the agriculture course taught by Future Farmers of America adviser Abigail Snyder. As part of FFA, the students wrote their own poultry stories and read them to first-graders.
Snyder said presenting to younger students was a healthy challenge for the animal science class and less basic than a test.
“Not only did it help summarize the unit, but they found it really challenging to rework everything they’ve learned into a younger level,” Snyder said.
Prior to reading to first graders, the students took part in a poultry contest where they identified different cuts of meat and judged chickens and eggs.
The chicken unit consisted of learning the egg life cycle, breeds, anatomy and various parts of a carcass.
“We also learned about vertical integration, which is like how Tyson does their chicken from the feeding mills down to where we get ours from at the meat market or supermarket,” sophomore Taylor Neis said.
LaPean said the first graders had many questions and their own stories about chickens.
“I loved reading to the little kids because they were so bewildered by the amazement of how chickens live and what more they do than just what we visually think,” LaPean said. “Like why they wake us up in the morning.”
Each student’s story was different. Neis’s story contained different vocabulary such as “rooster” and identified various breeds of chickens. Her story informed the first grade class of the process from egg to full-grown chicken, including identifying the body parts.
“It was fun figuring out how to get it from being a lot of information for teens and adults to something a first grader would understand,” Neis said.
LaPean hopes to be an agriculture teacher like Snyder someday and enjoyed teaching kids more about livestock.
Coming up, the FFA students have an agriculture speech contest, livestock judging event and state contest in Manhattan at the end of April.
Reach reporter Daisy Bolin at [email protected].
