Wakulla County Cooperative Extension Service, University of Florida

I was at Wakulla Cooperative Extension Office for two weeks.
Check out their website: http://wakulla.ifas.ufl.edu/

The Cooperative Extension Service is nationwide and was established by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. It is a partnership between state land grant universities, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the county governments throughout the nation. All of these groups share in the planning, financing, and operation of extension programs. In Florida, the Cooperative Extension Service is administered by the University of Florida.

Wakulla County Commissioners provide support for local faculty, staff and facilities. The Wakulla County Cooperative Extension Service conducts research-based educational programs in Agriculture, Horticulture, Family & Consumer Sciences, marine interest, and 4-H Youth Development. Locally based advisory committees assure that programs are designed to meet community needs. Volunteer training is strongly emphasized in our programs to enable us to reach more of the county’s population.

These two weeks have been jammed packed with different events. The first day I attended a canning class to learn how to pressure can foods.

The next day I went to EFNEP nutrition lesson in a school. Later that day I went to an after school program where there was a guest speaker talking about electricity.

Wednesday I was not in the office as I had a makeup day for my renal rotation.

Thursday was a work from home day because my preceptor was out of the office.

Friday I attended a School Advisory Committee meeting. I found out that the extension services are now going to be promoting the USDA HealthierUS School Challenge program so we discussed this with the principle for a few minutes http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/healthierus/.

The second week I worked on my article for a local news paper and also worked on my lesson plan that I would be giving later that week. Shelley and I then met with a farm to school coordinator and spoke about what needs to be done to get some schools into the HealthierUS School Challenge. Tuesday I was at the Tallahassee Children's Day at the Capital (separate post).

Wednesday April 10th, I went to see an EFNEP nutrition lesson in a kindergarten classroom. It was really cute how involved and excited the students were for the nutrition lesson. They learned about vegetables.

The rest of the day I prepped the food for my nutrition lesson. My lesson was given later that afternoon. I taught the nutrition lesson to elementary school students about protein and Florida Agriculture. We made salsa- a bean, tomato, and corn salsa, then a mango salsa.

Thursday I was with Shelley helping her in the kitchen. We prepared different foods for an herb workshop that evening.

Friday morning I finished my newspaper article about dehydration. I then attended an EFNEP quarterly discussion.

I really enjoyed this rotation so I managed to go back for a couple extra days. This might have been my favorite rotation.