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Douglas County

K-State Research and Extension Douglas County 
2110 Harper Street
Lawrence KS 66046

Hours: 8 am - 5 pm
Monday - Friday

785-843-7058

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Bus Route Options: Route 1 & 5

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Extension Strategic Plan

Our 2023-2025 Strategic Plan for making K-State Research & Extension Douglas County grow and thrive with and for the community is here! Click below to learn more!

2023 - 2025 Strategic Plan of K-State Research & Extension Douglas County

4-H Members Learn by Doing

Nancy Noyes 
4-H Youth Development
Program Assistant 

A Short Course in the Cone of Experience Concept 

The 2023 4-H Achievement Celebration of last Sunday was by all accounts a success. The committee in charge of the event did aHow people learn best: The cone of experience. 80-90 percent "4-H learn by doing" Hear - See - Do | 50 percent Hear - See | 20 Percent Hear wonderful job of decorating our Building 21, and planning and catering the meal. All the 4-H members successes were highlighted, and volunteers were recognized for exceptional work in our program. Nickie and I are moving to the next stages of planning for the new 4-H Year. We look forward to our members re-enrollment (by December 1st!) In addition, I hope to see many fresh faces to Douglas County 4-H.

While it might seem like time for members to sit back and wait for County Club Day or even the County Fair to begin project work, that could lead to frustration and rushed work. Now is the time for our 4-Hers to consider their past projects, ones they would like to continue and any new areas of interest. The adage “work smarter, not harder” comes to mind now. This is the time for goal setting, and for planning and communicating with parents and project leaders. Older 4-H members should consider “piggybacking” projects. Piggybacking is the idea of adding a related project to an existing one to provide a broader, more challenging Another Graphic indicating the various ways to Apply 4-H Project Work to the Cone of Experience depending on project being doneexperience. For example, if a member is enrolled in Foods & Nutrition, consider how what you plan to take to the fair can reflect skills learned in another project area such as Health & Wellness, Horticulture or Animal Science. They can then incorporate these projects into one another in the form of a Health project demonstration at club day with a poster from it that can be a fair entry. The food entry for the fair can be a home preservation project from the garden or a harvested farm animal, and so on.

It is important to remember “people learn best when they hear, see and do”, the life skill of Learn By Doing. This concept, a cornerstone of the National 4-H Program, is known as the Cone of Experience (Edgar Dale, 1969). This experience is a method that easily describes how the effectiveness of learning increases as one moves up the cone. Refer to the diagrams below to see a clear depiction of this concept and how we apply the cone to 4-H project work.