Programme brings taste of country to schools

The kids at Fordell School are getting a taste of farm life as part of the Ag-In-Schools programme.
The programme is being pushed by New Zealand Young Farmers in a bid to familiarise school children with the agricultural sector in a way they can understand.
Teacher Gwenda Pease is driving the programme at Fordell and she said it recognised that agriculture, as a subject, had slipped off the school curriculum.
"The aim is to promote farming in a way kids can understand," Ms Pease said.
"What we're saying is that we need to learn about everything we can but agriculture has sort of been missing from our schools for a while now.
"You go on international websites and every country has huge emphasis an agriculture being taught at a primary school level except New Zealand," she said.
"But this is our nation's primary industry and we should be telling these kids that farming is a viable career option."
Ms Pease said while the programme had a strong rural bent it was aiming to get urban schools involved as well and already a number of town schools in Taranaki were involved.
The programme is in its first year at Fordell School and last week some Year 8 and Year 1 students visited Paul and Kirsten Bryant's sheep and cattle farm.
"We've got six units the kids will take part in and that will take us about two years to work through," Ms Pease said.
The six units include general farming, animal health and welfare, rural safety, farm technology and innovation, environment and "paddock to plate".
Some of the units are pretty practical and over the next two years the Fordell students will visit three different farms.
Ms Pease is helping write the programme which has its roots in university programmes run at Massey and Lincoln. In essence the teachers have dumbed the programme down to a primary school level to make it work in that environment.
She said not all schools are able to integrate an agricultural syllabus as easily as some others but they can be modified to suit.
"Some schools will be able to have their students rearing farm animals as pets. We know that's not practical in an urban school so the focus there would be on growing plants."
She said while the programme would get into rural schools initially it was important to get it into urban schools.
"I'm very excited about it. It's really about giving them a few more options for their future," Ms Pease said.
Bronwyn Muir, manager of AgriKidsNZ, said the organisation was collaborating with industry sectors to gather information and translate that into teaching resources.
"These can be used by teachers from new entrant level to Year 8 students," Ms Muir said.
"Many of the current resources available are very out of date, non-Kiwi, and inappropriate for some age groups. Those sectors have educational departments and funding set aside for the purpose of educating the next generation and ours is the vehicle to bring this information into the classroom," she said.