Summer STEM Learning with 4-H

• Owen Spahr, Nutritional Science, University of Delaware

• Jennifer Trunfio, 4-H, University of Delaware

My summer was spent teaching thirty to sixty minute lessons to youth summer campers up and down the state of Delaware. I was tasked with a list of different lesson topics and ended up teaching one nutrition science lesson, two environmental science, two engineering, one financial literacy, and one exercise science activity. Teaching was not new to me as I’ve coached and worked with kids before however lesson planning was a new challenge. After the first week alone I learned that some lessons, although clear on paper, were not easy to execute and I needed to have contingency plans. Kids would break the materials or couldn’t get along with their partner. Learning to adapt on the fly improvising to meet the challenge kept my summer interesting. My two most valuable take-aways are that kids are easily influenced and as a teacher you need to be able to appeal to your audience. Kids are only going to be involved if you are involved and think the activity is cool and fun. Kids were much more engaged with a lesson if I could get them excited about the topic before we did the activity. After explaining the lesson I would float around and have some one on one time to further explain, answer questions, and help with the lesson. This also helped greatly as it boosted their confidence in completing whatever task was at hand. As a college student teaching six year olds about nutrition, you can imagine how the original lesson plan for 8-12 year olds might change. Being able to adapt and appeal to a younger audience was important for my success this summer in numerous lessons.