Fun 4-H meeting ideas. Tips for leading 4-H project meetings.
4-H,  Family

Planning 4-H Project Meetings

/
Tweet
Pin3K
Share
3K Shares

So you have found yourself leading a 4-H project, now what? I was roped into leadership during my second year as a 4-H parent with no idea of what I was doing. Luckily for me, I was teamed up with another mom who shares my love of preparation. We found out we make a great team and our year usually runs smoothly because we take the time to plan everything ahead of time. I wanted to share some of the things we do to plan out our 4-H meetings.

 

*This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase something from one of the links on this page I will make a percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. See full disclosure here.


The projects I co-lead are some of the largest our club has to offer. With a lot of kids, parents, and younger siblings at project meetings if we are not prepared it turns into chaos (sometimes it’s chaotic even when we do prepare)!

The 4-H slogan is “Learn by Doing”. When planning a 4-H meeting our goal is that kids would learn but have fun doing it. There is nothing more boring than sitting there listening to somebody talk at you for an hour and a half. 

Preparation is key!

Preparation is the key to 4-H meetings going well. If we wait until the last minute to plan the meeting often we fall back into whatever is easiest. My co-leader and I fill out a yearly plan with the topics we want to discuss and fill in whatever games we know we want to incorporate into the meeting. 
 

After each meeting we sit down for a few minutes and fill out a schedule for the next meeting based on our ideas from the yearly schedule. At this point we assign tasks and decide who will bring the supplies needed for that meeting. This only takes a few minutes and keeps everything fresh in our heads. 

 

I created a couple of Planning Sheets for you. To get your free planning sheets fill out the form below.

Free Printables for Planning 4-H Meetings
 

As you plan don’t forget to use the resources available to you. Your county extension office should have all kinds of resources to help make your meetings interesting. Most of our game ideas came from a rabbit leaders guide that our county provided. The great thing is that the ideas for rabbit are pretty adaptable to the other species. 

Unisex T-shirt. "All the COOL people raise goats"
Go PIG or go home!
Fun t-shirt for the rabbit lover in your life!
Show like a boss shirt

Games, Games, Games!

Like I said above we want our 4-H meetings to be educational AND fun! To accomplish this we play a lot of games. Here are a few games we have played at meetings:
 
Charades (demonstrating how to care for our animal in hot/cold weather)
Memory (we match diseases with symptoms)
Jeopardy (with facts about the animal separated by category)
Matching Game (this included picking a card and running to the other side of the room to find it’s match)
Simon Says (works great for younger kids learning basics)
Concentration
Animal Project Planner

Looking for a way to keep your 4-H project on track? Check out my Animal Project Organizer on ETSY! You can click here to purchase the Organizer for just $4.99

Utilize Older Kids!

It has been said that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. We love to have our older more experienced kids help teach. Often the “littles” behave better for the older kids!
Running Games is a great opportunity for the older kids to gain leadership experience. Everyone in our county has to do a presentation for their project book and if we can combine that with having one member teaching younger members then it is a win/win.

Hands on Learning!

One of my favorite things to do is to get the kids involved in an activity. With animal projects it’s especially helpful if they can literally get “hands on” experiences. We have brought in a class of rabbits and had an older kid teach about judging rabbits. Then the kids came up and practiced what they learned by judging the class of rabbits for themselves. 

 

Skill-a-thons are an awesome way to get hands on learning. We double this up as presentations for our experienced members. We divide everyone up into groups of 3-4 and have stations that they rotate around to. An experienced member mans the station and does a demonstration for each group that comes by. Here are just a few of the skill stations we have had:

Tattooing Station: they practiced tattooing on banana peels

Nail trimming: they got a teaching then got to practice on a live animal with supervision

Disqualifications/Faults: the member manning this station created an activity for them to do after she did her teaching.

Health Checks: this station showed the kids how to do a complete health check on their rabbit. 

Goat Herd Coffee/Tea Mug

4-H Mom Tote Bag

You might also like these posts:

4-H Program|An Overview

4-H Buyer Thank You Tutorial

Preparing For Fair|Packing Lists for Your Show Animals

Whatever you decide to do at your meetings keep it fun! The kids are much more engaged with active learning. If you are new to leading 4-H meetings I hope this post helps you when it comes time to plan your meetings. Good luck and have fun!

I would love to hear any ideas you come up with. I’m always looking for fresh ideas!

If this post was helpful please share it with others!

4-H project meeting volunteer. How to organize and lead a 4-H project.

8 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Thriving On Ordinary