Mobile lab brings ‘agriculture to the kids’
Warren Area Elementary Center second-grader Conner Campman selects agriculture necklace items — dirt, worms, water, sunlight, animals, and plants — with the help of Mobile Ag Lab Instructor Cathy Vorisek.
Warren Area Elementary Center second-graders (from right) Jackson Maxwell, Emory Buchanan, and Briley Rockwell select items — dirt, worms, water, sunlight, animals, and plants — for their agriculture necklaces at the Mobile Ag Lab.
Warren Area Elementary Center second-grader Conner Campman selects agriculture necklace items — dirt, worms, water, sunlight, animals, and plants — with the help of Mobile Ag Lab Instructor Cathy Vorisek.
Warren Area Elementary Center second-graders (from right) Jackson Maxwell, Emory Buchanan, and Briley Rockwell select items — dirt, worms, water, sunlight, animals, and plants — for their agriculture necklaces at the Mobile Ag Lab.
Trending
The Mobile Ag Lab is a mixture of a farm and a classroom on wheels.
"Our goal is to bring agriculture to the kids," Instructor Cathy Vorisek said.
And "what does agriculture mean?" she asked the Warren Area Elementary School second graders on the Ag Lab recently.
"Farming!" the students shouted.
"This lesson was talking about different farms," Vorisek said.
She introduced several familiar species raised on farms -- from cows, pigs, and chickens to corn, carrots, and potatoes. Then, she talked about some that the students didn't automatically think of being associated with farming.
She said bees can grow on a farm and are critical to other species.
"Who likes apples? … strawberries? … pumpkins? … pickles?" she asked, with children chiming in enthusiastically for each crop. "We wouldn't have any of that without honeybees."
"We've got more than animals and food and bees," Vorisek said. "We have farms that grow Christmas trees."
The self-contained classroom carries 38 different experiments, she said.
The next on the schedule dealt with hand-washing.
Each of the experiments involves some aspects of the core classroom subjects.
Locally, the project is funded by the Warren County Farm Bureau.