MAES Evans Wins AITC Rockstar Teacher Award
Posted on 05/31/2022
Over the past year, Crystal Evans, a teacher at Mason Creek Elementary School, has kept her eyes open for ways to incorporate agriculture education into her class’ lessons. For her efforts, Evans was presented the Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC) Rockstar Teacher Award by Farm Bureau on Thursday.
“I love bringing agriculture to the classroom,” said Evans. “Incorporating agriculture really opens up a lot of our students' minds to things they don’t get to see outside of the classroom a lot of the time. I’ve noticed with me doing this in the classroom, some our our students have made gardens at home.”
Along with winning the award, Evans received a $100 from Douglas County Farm Bureau, and she will also receive an all-expenses paid trip to Saratoga, New York, to attend the 2022 National AITC Conference.
The AITC contest was created by Natalie Murray, a teacher at Mirror Lake Elementary School who helps Douglas County Farm Bureau with educational outreach.
Murray wanted a way to get educators excited about “teaching through the lens of agriculture,” so she piloted the program at MLES last year.
This year, the contest morphed into a competition between two schools to see which teachers could incorporate the most agricultural topics into their lessons, and MAES’ Evans came out on top.
“I’m very excited to be able to give this award,” said Murray. “For me to teach through the lens of agriculture in my classroom and be a resource for others and be a liaison between Farm Bureau and the teachers. Farm Bureau provides so many resources, and it’s so awesome to see other teachers using them and doing this.”
In some of her lessons, Evans used MAES’ chicken farm as a major way to bring new concepts to students through agriculture in the classroom.
“We have our chicken farm outside, and we talk about how we get eggs from our chickens and we sell them, and the kids were really excited about selling them,” Evans said. “And we just hatched a bunch of eggs in the spring, so it was really neat that they got to see the other side of things, because in the winter time, we were selling them.”