Franklin Regional students 'discover dairy' by adopting a Holstein calf

A classroom pet isn’t always a workable scenario for an elementary school teacher.

But when that pet can help students learn across several school subjects, the decision is a lot easier.

That’s how Brienne May’s fifth-grade science class at Franklin Regional Intermediate School found themselves adopting a 100-pound Holstein calf named Milkyway from Kurtland Farms in eastern Pennsylvania.

The “Adopt-a-Cow” program is part of Discover Dairy, a program that touches on math, science, reading and social studies while demonstrating the milk production cycle and emphasizing the importance of dairy farming and agriculture.

“If a farmer is going to have a newborn calf near the start of the school year, they can sign up and teachers will get updates on how the calf is doing, information on its physical progress, and information about agriculture that we can use in multiple educational disciplines,” May said.

Franklin Regional students in the Discovery Dairy program have practiced writing by drafting letters to their farmer, Paige Miller at Kurtland Farms. They’ve also taken virtual field trips and touched on social studies by looking at different cow breeds around the world.

“As a science teacher, one of the things we learn about is that all food energy ultimately comes from the sun,” she said. “It grows plants, the animals eat the plants and so on. And we can look at these resources and understand how the milk we get from a cow was created from the energy it got by eating grass, which got its energy to grow from sun.”

There’s even an art component, through a Discovery Dairy drawing and coloring contest.

“The topic is ‘how food gets from the farm to the grocery store,’ so it’s great to be able to show the kids that connection, especially using art, which most of them already love. It’s definitely the most popular activity we’ve done,” May said.

Discover Dairy isn’t the only program aiming to use agriculture in multiple classes. The Pennsylvania FFA, formerly the Future Farmers of America, has a website dedicated to cross-curricular resources with lesson plans, video resources and suggestions for student activities.

Discover Dairy is a yearlong program, as May and her students check in with Miller throughout the school year, receive real-time data about Milkyway, and even get silly photos such as Milkyway wearing a Santa hat around Christmastime.

Zooming out a little farther, Discover Dairy is just one element that imparts the district’s environmental science standards to students.

“It’s important in this region to look at the role of agriculture, and this is just one piece of a much larger agricultural body of study we do,” May said. “We have a ‘Trout in the Classroom’ program, we build hydroponic gardens. We’re really learning were our food comes from, and what growing food looks like.”

May said state science standards were adopted with significant feedback from Pennsylvania’s agriculture industry.

“It’s important to them that Pennsylvania kids understand these processes and learn about from kindergarten up through 12th grade.”