by Mike Orso
(Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series on efforts to increase food and farming literacy in McHenry County.)
North Elementary School’s Kaylin Moreland teaches not three, but four core basics when it comes the children in her 4th grade Crystal Lake classroom. They include reading, writing, arithmetic and – you guessed it – agriculture.
“I realized they might not even know what ‘agriculture’ means,” said Moreland, who participated in this year’s Summer Agriculture Institute held in June by the Lake and McHenry County Farm Bureaus (MCFB). “That was a little shocking to me.”
With that fact as a foundation, Moreland started to utilize some of the books, calendars, magazines and posters available to teachers across the county and state as part of the Farm Bureau’s decades-old Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC) program. The non-profit MCFB Foundation funds AITC agriculture literacy programs throughout McHenry County.
“A lot of them hear, ‘farming,’ and then that kind of clicked,” said Moreland about the 25 youngsters she has guided in her classroom since a new school year started in late August. “But the word, ‘agriculture’ was very foreign to them.”
After diving into magazines entitled “Ag Mags” once a week on topics such as apples, corn, cows, pollinators, pumpkins, soybeans and tomatoes, her class engages in activities to demonstrate what they’ve learned.
“My students will sit in reading stations and they’ll get a chance to read one of the Ag Mags,” said Moreland. “They get to pick which ones they connect with and they learn about that topic. They really enjoy it.”
The class reads an agriculture fact of the day on annual AITC calendars and has also started utilizing an online lesson series about dairy.
“We’ve been using that program, so we got to adopt a cow,” said Moreland. “We just got assigned our baby calf in October. Every month we’ll see posts about the calf and how much it weighs, any updates and pictures. Our cow is actually out in Sycamore. The kids really want to go visit the cow.”
The resources and activities used thus far have helped inform the class enough that they have started to define what agriculture is and what it means to them in their daily lives.
“As technology has become really prominent with kids this age, I want them to still feel connected to nature and know where food comes from,” said Moreland. “It is something that I realized that I didn’t know maybe a lot myself about, so I wanted to take the time to educate myself more so that I could educate my students.”
A native of Cary, Moreland has visited local farmers markets and driven by county farm fields. Still, she acknowledges she knew very little about the people who made a living as a result of what is raised and grown throughout the McHenry County and Illinois countryside. A 2015 graduate of Prairie Ridge High School in Crystal Lake, she also made the trek by farm fields as a student and 2019 elementary education graduate of Illinois State University in the central Illinois town of Normal.
“These materials are very doable,” said Moreland. “They are accessible and they give students a lot of good connections to our community.”
As a result of her participation in the annual summer institute for county teachers, Moreland hopes to take advantage of grant opportunities available to her and other teachers in McHenry County for books and special projects about food and farming. She also took advantage to personally learn more by visiting three farms participating in the annual McHenry County Farm Stroll held in late September.
“It is something that everyone should learn about,” she said. “I think it’s such a great program to teach our kids about the community around us and where our food comes from, our animals, and nature, and just really tie our students back into the area that we live in.”
If you’re a teacher or know of one who might be interested in learning more, you can contact the McHenry County Farm Bureau by email at aitc@mchenrycfb.org or by calling its Woodstock office at (815) 338-1520.
Crystal Lake North Elementary’s Kaylin Moreland stands by some of the Agriculture in the Classroom resources she has displayed and uses in her 4th grade classroom.
4th graders at North Elementary School in Crystal Lake write what agriculture means to them on a poster in Ms. Moreland’s classroom. Among the postings: “Agriculture is food and taking care of animals, Agriculture helps us learn fun facts, Agriculture provides meat, dairy and crops.”
These represent some of the resources 4th grade teacher Kaylin Moreland uses in her Crystal Lake classroom.
Cary native Kaylin Moreland teaches in Crystal Lake School District 47, one of the county’s largest. “I love teaching. I’ve always known that teaching was my passion, something I’ve always enjoyed. I love making connections with students and helping them through the good and hard parts of life and being able to support them.”