Schools have been back in session for nearly a month now, but 4-H is headed back into schools beginning this month. Starting in September and continuing throughout the school year, Gordon County 4-H holds over 70 school club meetings each month. These school club meetings are the backbone of the 4-H program, with nearly 1,600 students participating at the school level last year. Meetings are held at each of the public elementary, middle, and high schools in the city and county each month, and every youth in grades 4-12 in both the city and county school systems have an opportunity to take part in 4-H at school each month. These school club meetings provide educational standards-based lessons in the classroom, utilizing the resources and relationships of University of Georgia Extension to offer value-added co-curricular instruction. Each of the lessons is full of hands-on interactive activities to teach material in a fun and engaging way. School administrators and classroom teachers choose the educational lessons that 4-H offers in their classrooms and can tailor the content directly to their needs.
Beginning in 4th grade, Gordon County 4-H comes into the classroom to provide these club meetings. This year, 4th graders across the schools will learn about topics as varied as:
- Weather, using M&M’s to find weather patterns and draw a weather map
- Earth science, creating models of the Earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun
- Ecosystems, acting out the parts of food chains and webs
- Water, acting as a drop of water traveling through the water cycle
- Light and sound, creating telephones from cups using different materials to detect differences in sound quality
- Force and motion, using balanced and unbalanced forces to build a catapult
- Budgeting, distinguishing between needs and wants and taking a money values quiz
- Career exploration in:
- Architecture and construction, building a tower of straws, paper clips, and rubber bands to hold a ball
- Business management and administration, playing a communications and decision making game
- Manufacturing, using an assembly line process to make origami
- STEM, engineering a catapult to launch a ball at a target
Students in 5th grade will receive instruction on:
- Electricity, designing a circuit and testing common materials to determine if they are conductors
- Inherited traits, playing a chance game to see how traits are passed from parent to offspring
- Microorganisms, demonstrating how germs spread from one person to another rapidly
- Career exploration in
- Finance, playing a “Bean Budget” game
- Marketing, playing a logo and slogan quiz game
- Government and Public Administration, playing “Who Ya Gonna Call?” when you need a government service
- Information Technology, doing a simple coding activity to learn about binary code
Clubs in 6th-12th grade focus more on life skill development, including activities that build communication, goal setting, and teamwork. These grades also have opportunities to develop leadership and public speaking skills.
The school club meeting schedule for each week will be published on the Calhoun Times 4-H News page and the full meeting schedule for the year is available on the event calendar on the Gordon County 4-H website. For more information about the in-school programming done by Gordon County 4-H, please contact the Gordon County Extension/4-H Office at 706-629-8685.
