UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Family Room Building will host a variety of mental health and physical wellness education programs for children and adults during Penn State’s Ag Progress Days, Aug. 8-10.
The Family Room is located on Main Street between Eighth and Ninth streets at the Ag Progress Days site. Talks and demonstrations will take place daily, covering topics such as tick repellants, sun protection and skin cancer with the Penn State Cancer Institute.
Educators from Penn State Extension’s Food, Families and Health and Food Safety and Quality programs will prepare healthy recipes and demonstrate safe home-food preservation techniques. Recipe demonstrations will include apple pancakes, crunchy Thai and quinoa salad, Persian-style grilled vegetables, broccoli salad, ginger lime watermelon salad and Mediterranean chickpea salad. Food preservation demonstrations will focus on tomatoes/salsa, quick dill pickles and strawberry jam.
The Ag Progress Days Facebook page will feature food demonstrations and live speaking presentations for those interested in tuning in online.
The Thrive Initiative parenting program presentation is designed to help parents foster a holistic approach to community youth development and resiliency throughout childhood and adolescence by focusing on practices and strategies that nurture the parent-child relationship and promote positive child development outcomes.
Demonstrations also will educate attendees about reducing the stigma and increasing awareness about mental health and the importance of suicide prevention. A health literacy program demonstration is aimed at helping farmers and small business owners understand health care insurance plans.
Also on hand will be Penn State Health’s LION Mobile Clinic, which uses a student-run, free clinic model to increase access to health care and promote healthy choices for under-resourced communities of Pennsylvania. During Ag Progress Days, the clinic will offer information about ways to access health care, provide fun activities for kids while promoting healthy lifestyles and sun safety, give tours of the mobile unit, and educate the community. A skin cancer screening clinic will be offered from 5 to 7 p.m., Aug. 9.
The Pesticide Education Program display will enable visitors to explore whether a plant, insect or animal is always a pest, sometimes a pest, or never a pest. When deciding if it is a pest, decisions should be based on proper identification and where the plant, bug or animal is located. Visitors will have a chance to spin the wheel, answer a question and win a prize.
Sponsored by Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, Ag Progress Days is held at the Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center at Rock Springs, 9 miles southwest of State College on Route 45. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Aug. 8; 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Aug. 9; and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 10. Admission and parking are free.
For more information, visit the Ag Progress Days website. Twitter users can find and share information about the event by using the hashtag #agprogressdays, and the event also can be found on Facebook (@AgProgressDays).