Agriculture in Illinois - "A Student's Perspective"

I teach in a suburban area of Chicago, but grew up in a small town in the heart of Illinois. We are in a state where 90% of our economy is based on agribusiness, but my students are complete unaware of this in their daily lives. Our adventure will be a series of fieldtrips in which we travel 1 hour from our town in alternate directions, video tape different environments and schedule tours of agribusinesses. Within 1 hour of our town limits, my fourth grade class can travel to rural farming land where the business begins, locations on the Illinois Waterway that helped build Chicago into the great trade city it is today, as well as downtown to see the urban setting where our agricultural commodities are traded and processed. Upon return from these excursions, each fourth grader will partner up with another classmate to edit the video footage they took on our adventure , narrate the information, and present it to our school through a series of school wide broadcasts.

Step 1:

Schedule a fieldtrip to a working farm where students "get their hands dirty" while they help feed livestock, care for animals and/or crops, study soil types, discuss a farmer's daily tasks, etc. while shooting self-selected footage of the farming environment for their broadcast. On our return journey from the farm, we will stop at a farming equipment and supply store to learn about the expenses of an agribusiness. This too will be an opportunity for the students to shoot more footage for their narrated broadcast.

Schedule a fieldtrip to a local cannery or food processing center (ex. Lay's Potato Chips) where students learn about the next step in the agricultural process. Students will choose opportunities to shoot footage at the factories that they will later narrate with facts about the industry and broadcast to Pleasant Hill School through our video announcement system.

Schedule a fieldtrip to downtown Chicago to learn about commodities trading and how that impacts the entire agricultural industry. This will be the final class outing to collect video footage for our broadcasting project.

Step 2:

After each fieldtrip students will download their video files, narrate them with facts they learned on our trips plus any facts they found through additional research, and edit them into polished broadcasts. These broadcasts will be shown daily following the morning announcements on our video broadcast system so that all grade levels will learn from and be impacted by the fourth graders' experiences.

Step 3:

Show our broadcasts at our March Open House for Parents to enjoy.

Step 4:

Encourage other grade levels to take advantage of this wonderful technology and create their own interactive projects that they can do with this engaging technology.