Hands-on outdoor experiences for kids

Let’s walk through a field trip at Columbia’s Agriculture Park. Do you remember being a kid, waking up in the morning with that feeling of excitement because you were going on a field trip? Close your eyes for a moment and imagine.

Take those steps up onto the school bus, pick a seat next to your best friend, and watch the town zip by as you head to visit a farm. When you get there, you’re thinking, “Where are the cows?” Stepping down off the bus you see the ARC where your older brother goes to play basketball and you see a playground. This doesn’t look like a farm. Then you see Mrs. Keith. You get excited because she comes to your classroom every other week, and that means fun things are ahead like tasting new vegetables and diagraming the parts of a flower from your school garden.

You get off the bus and you’re standing in a single-file line. “Class, class!” the teacher announces. You respond “Yes, yes!” in unison with your classmates. “We are here at Columbia’s Agriculture Park and today we get to explore the park. We’ll get to learn about all the food that’s growing here, about the history of farming in Columbia, and we’ll get a yummy snack too!” You ask, “Do we get to play on the playground?” Maybe. Your class starts walking down the sidewalk, following a tour guide. You reach a garden with all kinds of plants in it, and the guide asks, “Who has a garden at home?” You raise your hand and tell them that your grandma lives out in the country and has a garden. You sometimes help pick tomatoes and cucumbers.

Placing Learners, Agriculture, and Nature Together Sustainably

Your friend looks over and says, “I thought you had to be out in the country for all this. I guess not.” There are some unfamiliar plants growing. You’ve eaten sweet potatoes, peppers, and onions before, except they look a little different on the plant. The guide asks how plants get their energy. You think the energy must come from the soil. Then you learn it is actually from the sun because of photosynthesis. You learn about the food web. If plants get their energy from the sun, and we eat plants, then people get energy from the sun too. Your muscles are solar powered! After exploring the gardens, you finally get to sit down on a bench in the shade. You’re going to meet an actor, someone pretending to be a real person who used to live in Columbia a long time ago.

A man in overalls comes out from behind an apple tree. He lived in Columbia over a hundred years ago. He tells you that he had a farm on Switzler Street. That's right around the corner from your house, but there's no farm there now. The man's name was Henry Kirklin and he taught people how to graft apple trees at the University of Missouri. He said grafting is when you cut a branch off one tree and tape it to another to make a really strong tree with delicious fruits. That sounded made up. You can’t really just tape two trees together? Then he showed the class a little bump on an apple tree where it really did look like someone just taped two trees together. That’s how they make all of the different types of apple trees, it's just cutting one branch off a tree of a good-tasting apple and taping it to the branch of another tree that has strong roots. It isn’t just planting seeds, like Johnny Appleseed. The actor asks if the class has any questions. You raise your hand and say, “I think I want to be a farmer!” He comes over with a big smile and shakes your hand.

The last part of the field trip is awesome. You get to eat chips and salsa. The teacher talks about the different parts of the plant that we eat. Fruit, flower, seed, stem, leaf, and root. The salsa is made up of fruit (the tomato), roots (the onion), and stems and leaves (the cilantro). You’re going to figure out the parts of the plant for all the things on the salad bar in the school cafeteria. Finally, after your snack and all of the things you learned at the park, it was time to play on the playground until the school bus came to pick you up. Yessssss, the playground. What a fun day! You learned so much, and it didn’t really feel like learning.