Virginia Berg

Last Friday’s snow caused many cancellations, but it didn’t stop members of Phi Upsilon Omicron from conducting their community service project by helping out the Boys and Girls Club of Brookings.

Phi Upsilon Omicron, which serves as the National Honor Society for the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, has a themed professional project every year. “This year’s theme is ‘Many Paths Same Destination,”‘ said senior dietetics major and Vice President of Phi Upsilon Omicron, Veronica O’Leary.

The group started brainstorming ideas for the project in November, and broke into smaller groups based upon their majors from there. Each group then created an activity related to their majors that would be suitable for kids to do, said Phi Upsilon Omicron’s president and senior nutritional sciences major Brittany Gorres.

In the past, the group has worked to bridge the gap between young adults and the elderly, said O’Leary. But this time the group decided to work with middle-school students.

“We decided to work with middle-school students because they haven’t started to really think of what they are going to do after high school yet, and we wanted to give them some ideas of the options that are out there for them,” said Gorres.

Upon deciding that working with middle- school students would be best, the group chose to volunteer at the Boys and Girls Club of Brookings. The group found that it was a good place for their project because there are a lot of middle-school students there, said Gorres.

The end result was four different stations with hands-on activities for the sixth through eighth graders of the Boys and Girls Club to go to. Each group’s project seemed to go over well with the kids.

The groups of four to five middle-school students spent fifteen minutes at each of the stations where a small group of SDSU students talked to them about the different majors available in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, then guided them through an activity related to that station’s major.

Not only were the students having fun, but they were learning at the same time. At the Nutrition, Food Science and Dietetics group’s station, the kids learned how to read a nutrition facts label, and about career options within that major.

Creativity also came into play with the Interior Design station. At this station, the sixth- through eighth-graders were able to design their own kitchen, and color it in their own motif.

The Human Development group chose a project where the kids set out to create a timeline of their life that included their life-long goals. For this activity the kids focused on major life events that both have and have not yet happened.

The middle-school students also had a chance to discover through creatively playing with a homemade etch-a-sketch, experimenting with food coloring and corn syrup, and becoming amused with a mixture of corn starch and water at the Early Childhood Development station.

“The kids seem to really like [the activities],” said Gorres. Gorres also said, “[The kids also] found them particularly enjoyable due to the hands-on element [of the activities] which allows them to learn through the activities.”