When Abby Hennington, a visual arts teacher at a middle school near Atlanta, Georgia, realized she was going to be following a hybrid teaching model this school year, she was looking for creative ways to uplift and motivate her art students, both in person and virtually. Abby teaches middle school students from a wide range of demographics, with several of her students living on working farms while others live in more metropolitan areas and have parents who commute to Atlanta each day.

After hearing about Discover Dairy’s Adopt a Cow program, Abby signed up to ‘adopt’ a calf from a dairy farm. Her classroom was paired with a calf named Fiesta from Big Sandy Creek dairy farm. Throughout the program, she receives photos, video updates, and activity sheets that allow her art students to learn about dairy farming and watch their calf grow.

“I knew this year was going to be challenging in so many ways, and I was looking for fun and uplifting themes to start off our year. I’ve had both in-person students and distance learning students since August of 2020,” Abby shared. “I thought the Adopt a Cow program sounded like a fun way to connect art with other common themes in our area. I was attracted to the idea of using this theme as an ongoing mascot of sorts this school year in my art program.”

Her middle school art program is year-long with limited seats, so students must apply and be accepted. Due to strong interest, there is a wait list for all three grades. With visual arts being such a strong program in her school district, Abby has the time to devote to exposing students to different themes and ideas. Throughout the Adopt a Cow program, this gave her the freedom and flexibility to get extremely creative with the dairy-themed activities she organized for her students.

To start, two of Abby’s students with the help of Booster parents planned an exciting gender reveal activity. Abby also assigned both focused projects and choice projects. Focused projects included timed drawings of their adopted calf to increase skill level and discuss the musculature of the cows. Students also studied landscape and learned about the different areas, equipment, and living quarters of the cows, which eventually turned into multimedia paintings.

For the choice projects, Abby gave students a theme and allowed them to use any supply they wanted to make an art piece on that theme. These projects led to clay cow sculptures, carvings of silos, comic strips of Fiesta, charcoal drawings, and more. As they finish these projects throughout the year, an entire area of their art show is dedicated to the classroom’s partnership with Discover Dairy and their host farm, Big Sandy Creek Dairy Farm.

By introducing her students to some of the scientific parts of agriculture and combining them with different art techniques, Abby has been able to make meaningful STEM connections.

“Our school is STEM-certified through our county and currently working toward STEM certification through our state. I love to connect art to other areas of study and show my students how many career paths can be creative and art-based,” Abby said. “At this age, students still think artists have to be painters who have their artwork in galleries. We talk about how that’s a great goal, but there are many other ways that we celebrate and use art in our daily lives and careers.”

During these STEM connections, students learned about logos, such as the Discover Dairy logo, and how and why they are important. They also learned about the skeletal and muscle system of humans and animals, including their adopted calf. Abby says “connecting art to other disciplines helps to strengthen their education in both subjects and often helps certain standards stick.”

Beyond academics, Abby says the Adopt a Cow program has also allowed her middle school students to connect with dairy farmers in their community.

“This partnership helped us celebrate our rural location and learn more about our community. It was great to include my distance learners as well, and the calf photo and video updates that we received were very easy to share digitally. We have thoroughly enjoyed this program and continue to do so. We will even have a page about it in our yearbook this year,” Abby added.

Discover Dairy’s Adopt a Cow program gives students and families a firsthand look at dairy farming. For the 2020-21 school year, more than 70,000 classrooms and homes have signed up for the program, and it is expected to impact more than 1.5 million students across the nation.

Discover Dairy is an educational series managed by the Center for Dairy Excellence Foundation of Pennsylvania in partnership with American Dairy Association North East, Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, Midwest Dairy, and The Dairy Alliance.

Learn more about how you can support this program.

In Phoenix, Arizona, one preschool classroom is using Discover Dairy’s “Adopt a Cow” program to introduce real-world concepts to their students. After a parent told Summit School teacher Fredie Boudrie about the Adopt a Cow program, they signed up to be paired with a calf from a dairy farm. The class will receive photos, video updates, and activity sheets throughout the school year that allow them to watch their calf grow—with the first update set to arrive in mid-November with their calf’s name and photo.

As the preschoolers eagerly awaited news about their adopted calf, the Presidential election was in full swing. Boudrie decided the Adopt a Cow program and Discover Dairy unit could help create exciting connections with the election process for her young students.

“We didn’t know if our calf would be a Jersey or a Holstein breed. I thought it would be really fun, during the week of the Presidential election, to have students vote for which type of cow they think we’re going to adopt,” said Boudrie, a preschool teacher at the Summit School.

To give students an authentic voting experience, she created partition boards and an imaginary voting center. Students received their own voter identification cards, and only one person could be in the booth at a time. After seeing a picture of each breed of cow, they cast their votes and the results were divided: half of the students voted for a Jersey cow and the other half voted for a Holstein.

“Students don’t usually have a strong connection to the President. They know their parents vote, but adding the cow theme to the election activity this year was much more meaningful,” Boudrie added. “We had a good time with it. Presidents are just names to them, but the kids can get on board with cows because they have seen them when we’ve taken field trips to farms.”

In addition to the connections she made with the election, Boudrie was able to infuse different subjects and lessons into the Discover Dairy unit, including math and reading. The class held a group discussion to define the term ‘adopt,’ read books about cows, and created graphs with results from their votes.

After learning in a virtual environment last spring, her students’ experience with platforms like Zoom also made it easier for Boudrie to introduce the Adopt a Cow program to such a young age group.

“Last spring, when we taught remotely from home, they learned all about Zoom sessions and the Internet. Prior to that, I don’t think they would have understood how we were going to ‘adopt’ a cow they would never actually touch or see in person. But as we explained it to them, we were able to connect it to Zoom and virtual learning,” Boudrie said.

With several students continuing to learn remotely, while others are back in the classroom, the Adopt a Cow program has been an intriguing way for her students to stay connected during unconventional and ever-changing times.

“This program is definitely a blessing. It gives students something to look forward to,” Boudrie shared. “We have been back in person, but there are some kids who are still doing online learning. The Adopt a Cow program has been a good way to connect all of us, whether we’re at home or in the classroom. Kids love animals, so it has been a great way for them to engage and learn new facts.”

Discover Dairy’s Adopt a Cow program gives students and families a firsthand look at dairy farming. For the 2020-21 school year, more than 70,000 classrooms and homes have signed up for the program, and it is expected to impact more than 1.5 million students across the nation.

Discover Dairy is an educational series managed by the Center for Dairy Excellence Foundation of Pennsylvania in partnership with American Dairy Association North East, Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, Midwest Dairy, and The Dairy Alliance.

Learn more about how you can support this program.

With consumers becoming more interested in shopping locally, Mary Myers, a middle school teacher from Keystone SMILES Crossroads CLC, wanted her students to understand the role agriculture, and dairy farming, play in this consumer trend.

“I wanted to include a unit on Pennsylvania agriculture in my junior-high social studies class, and I decided dairy would be the best choice. There are dairy farms in the area that provide jobs to the community, and many of my students will be looking for work right after high school,” Mary said.

As she searched for lessons that could help her bring dairy farming into the classroom, she found the Discover Dairy lesson series—an interactive, cross-curricular, multi-level program managed by the Center for Dairy Excellence Foundation of Pennsylvania.

Designed for elementary and middle school students, the Discover Dairy program immediately interested her class. While many of her students grew up in areas surrounding dairy farms, Mary found they knew very little about the industry at the start of the unit. This opened the door for meaningful lessons and important conversations, specifically surrounding the environment and the local community.

“As soon as we finished the first lesson in the program, I could see the students were really responding to the information and activities,” Mary shared. “One of the lessons they most enjoyed was ‘In the Environment.’ Knowing farmers respect and want to preserve the environment was important to them.  They also enjoyed the ‘In the Community’ lesson. This lesson was truly an eye-opener for students when they realized how important it is to shop locally and support jobs in their hometowns.”

Along with making personal connections, the Discover Dairy lesson series gave students the chance to apply scientific concepts to real-life scenarios on the farm. Through interactive labs that complemented each lesson and reinforced specific concepts, students also benefited from hands-on learning opportunities.

“My favorite thing about the Discover Dairy lessons are the complimentary labs,” Mary said. “I use a lot of hands-on learning, and the labs lend themselves to my style of teaching. They were extremely useful for engaging students.”

During the culminating project for the Discover Dairy unit, Mary divided her students into groups and asked them to create a Pennsylvania dairy advertising campaign. After choosing a dairy product to promote on television, radio, print or social media, the students were able to get creative and develop scripts, backgrounds, photos and other content to showcase their dairy products.

“In the end, students created a billboard for yogurt, a TV commercial for ice cream, and a print ad for a dairy-based energy drink,” Mary explained. “The campaigns all advertised Pennsylvania dairy as the main ingredient for their product. I was extremely pleased with the outcome of the project.”

In addition to social studies, Mary has incorporated the Discover Dairy lessons into her English classes, pairing learning objectives and projects throughout the unit. For Mary’s students, what began as an initial interest in dairy blossomed into a deeper understanding of Pennsylvania agriculture and their role as consumers.

To learn more about the Discover Dairy lesson series and the free curriculum available to teachers, visit our website or call (717) 346-0849.