The organizer of an educational wheat program for Washington elementary school students wants teachers to pilot a new effort  for high school students.

In March, Kara Kaelber, education director of the Franklin Conservation District in Pasco, Wash., began Claims, Connections and Conversations.

Kaelber hopes 20 teachers will test the program in their classrooms next year. 

She has led the long-running Wheat Week program, funded by the Washington Grain Commission, for 15 years. It is a week-long hands-on science program for fourth- and fifth-graders. The students create wheat terrariums and raise a wheat plant.

The new program puts information about wheat farmers in front of high school students.

Topics include:

• How climate change affects Washington wheat farms.

• How wheat farms benefit from dams on the Snake River, and whether Idaho Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson’s plan to improve salmon habitat by removing the dams outweighs the benefits.

• How natural selection in weeds causes problems for wheat farmers.

• Whether no-till — raising crops without disturbing the soil through tillage — is a “no-brainer” for farmers.

• Challenges that WEED-IT precision spraying technology solves for farms and their neighbors. Using it, only weeds are sprayed.

The program is designed for high school social studies, science or English teachers to use and is modeled after science programs for claims, evidence and reasoning.

Teachers will give packets of information to students, who would read and discuss the topics.

“You’re getting that local, relevant information into their brains, and into the teachers’ brains as well,” Kaelber said. “I don’t think teachers would ever think to pull in agriculture just to get kids talking to each other, and having conversations. We don’t think about the people who feed us unless we don’t have food.”

FFA teachers might seem a good fit, “but it’s almost like preaching to the choir,” Kaelber said. “It’s trying to reach those new audiences that don’t know anything about ag, and trying to reel them in in some other way.”

Kaelber consulted with Jessica Kinney, a former Wheat Week instructor and now a high school science teacher, to develop the program. 

Kaelber is looking for teachers to take the program training workshop for free as a pilot. Teachers will receive STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) clock hours towards recertification. Teachers would receive a $200 stipend if they try the program in their classroom and fill out an evaluation form.

The grain commission provided $20,000 to develop the program.

“I know of no other program close to what she has accomplished in the wheat or even (the) agriculture industry,” commission  member Brian Cochrane said. “She characterizes the best approach to education — hands and heart on! Her passion for the ‘educational truth’ is paramount for young people to know when they become adults and consumers.”

“We believe it is important that our state’s youth have opportunities to strengthen their skills in critical thinking, identifying and critiquing claims from various sources, making connections across topics, communicating through authentic conversations,” commission CEO Glen Squires said.

https://www.franklincd.org/ccc-home

https://www.franklincd.org/wheat-week