Garden County Schools Science & Agriculture

Today  the Garden County Junior High local science fair winners competed at the Regional NJAS AHEC science fair virtually. Three contestants from each grade that won our local fair participated in today's judging. (See Science Fair Winners Blog Article ). The top six participants in grades six, seven, and eight for the Panhandle region will move on to participate in the Nebraska Junior Academy of Science Virtual State F air on April 1, 2021. Two Garden County students will move on to participate in this state fair. Congratulations to Olivia Christiansen for placing fifth and Abilene Miller for placing sixth place. Also participating today were Eldon Lambert, Kyan Kramer, Luke Gardner, Hailey Weih, Javis Underwood, Jase Roberson, and Natalie Coss.

 I had the opportunity to give a tour of the GC Greenhouse for the Center for Rural Affairs today.  Here is the link to the interview on their FaceBook page.

 On Wednesday, March 3, the first day of spring break five Garden County FFA students traveled to Kimball to compete in the FFA District 12 Livestock Selection Competition.  Kaylee Leach, Emily Levick, Oakley Larsen, Kyle Rote, and Gunner Roberson spent the day judging 7 different classes of animals, took a test, and then gave oral reasons over their selection.  Our top places were Gunner at 11th place and Emily placed 26th.  Overall the team placed ninth.

With FFA week also came a lot of fun over at the elementary! FFA members Tarah Ross and Madie Rauch went over to the elementary school to read to grades K-3 and made dirt cups with the fourth and fifth graders. The girls read Tractor MAC arrives at the farm to the kindergarteners, and Tops and Bottoms to the third graders on Tuesday. The second graders heard Farmer Dale’s Red pickup truck on Monday. On Thursday and Friday, the girls made dirt cup models explaining the layers of soil. They used Reese’s chips as the bedrock, crushed graham crackers as the subsoil, chocolate pudding as the parent material, crushed Oreos as the topsoil, and they used gummy worms as organic material.  If the students could recite the layers in order correctly they got whipped cream on the top of their yummy desserts. FFA members also went over before school and ate breakfast with all of the elementary students on Wednesday. Throughout the whole week, we explained the importance of FFA and what we do as a ch

The Garden County FFA Chapter celebrated National FFA Week from February 22 through February 26.   This National FFA Week embraces more than 93 years of  FFA traditions while looking forward to the organization's future. More than 760,000 members participated in National FFA Week activities at local, state, and national levels. These members have a passion for agriculture. Designated a national week in 1947, the week of George Washington's birthday, National FFA Week gives FFA members an opportunity to educate the public about agriculture. Today, FFA provides the next generation of leaders who will change the world. As the top school-based youth leadership development organization in the nation, FFA helps young people meet new agricultural challenges by developing their unique talents and exploring their interests in a broad range of career pathways. FFA members are our future leaders, our future food suppliers, our future innovators, and more! The National FFA Organization is

In the 8th-grade science class, we wanted to know why sometimes our phones break during a collision and other times they do not.  To figure this out we are investigating collisions. One of the experiments we did was hitting a lasagna noodle with a variety of different things, to model a cell phone screen in a collision. The noodles usually ended up getting shattered if they were hit hard enough and they were usually hit hard enough because they are super fragile. Some of the stuff we hit the noodles with are books, pens, markers, and toy cars. In the end, it was a fun experiment, and I think the whole class enjoyed it.  Next, we viewed three different collisions in slow motion to get an understanding of how motion and shape change during a collision. By Abilene Miller Video by Ely Olson