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The school program kicked off at J. J. Finley Elementary School, where we had about 28 students between 4th and 5th grades. The event took place on November 3rd from 2:30 to 3:30, and we were greeted by the After School Program Coordinator Mr. Mitchell Londrie. The members that participated were: Eric Dreyer, Gabe Shook, and Yael Spektor. Dr. Schneider provided incredible support and ideas to make this possible.
As soon as the students entered the room, we divided them into 3 groups to perform the activities. We started the presentation with the yeast activity, where students had to use balloons, yeast, and hot water (and one cold water sample) and they had to make predictions about what the outcome was going to be. While this activity was in progress, Dr. Schneider talked about yeast and microbes in general, the microscopic nature of germs and why it’s important to wash hands, the danger zone, critical cooking temperatures, and the four critical steps to preventing a food-borne illness. The balloons were measured several times throughout the presentation.
We also did the glow-germ washing exercise to determine the cleanliness of their hands, and to emphasize the importance of washing hands. We finalized the presentation by quizzing them about what they had learned by using buzzers in a college bowl type of competition. To our surprise, they were extremely entertained and knew the answers to all the questions without hesitation. All students participated in one activity or another, and all of them did the quiz bowl at the end.
Due to our tremendous success with the first school, today (November 20th) we will be going to Idylwild Elementary School for about 1 hr, where we are expecting about 30 4th and 5th graders once again. The After School Program Coordinator is Mr. Geoff Gerhardt, and Gator Chapter members attending are: Eric Dreyer, Gabe Shook, Sonia Hudson, Marianne Fatica, and Yael Spektor.
Since they have a cooking club, we will have a different approach. We will start off with an explanation of germs and FATTOM, and in an effort to emphasize the importance of removing moisture we will be cooking butter as an application. The idea is to divide them into 5 groups so each of them can make a different type of butter (salted, unsalted, herbs, cinnamon, and honey). We will have them taste each kind, and we will top it off with our famous college bowl to see how much information they retained.
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