McLean County 4-H First Rifle Clinic

Today we held the very first McLean County 4-H Rifle Shooting Sports Clinic! It was great to get youth involved in the sport! We had 32 kids participate, each getting multiple turns at the range. We shot Daisy 853 air rifles. I was impressed by the youth's quick learning and their attention to details. My goal is to introduce more kids to the sport and to take away some of the misconceptions about firearms. I'd like to get a small bore class setup. I need to start checking out sources for bolt action 22s...

McLean County 4-H Shooting Sports

The McLean County 4-H Shooting Sports program will be having its first clinic on Saturday, August 21, 2010. We are pretty excited, as are the 20+ participants. We've limited enrollment until we get some more instructors. We'll be using air rifles to begin with. The plan is for us to move into small bore (.22 rifles) and shotguns in early 2011.

The goal of the shooting sports program is to get youth interested in shooting sports. It also teaches discipline, responsibility, and coaching skills. Youth work in pairs to improve each others' skills. For some, this is their first exposure to peer reviews or peer coaching.

I'm excited to be one of the first instructors for the county!

2010 McLean County Fair

One word...disappointing. Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's that there are just too many other things going on in kids' lives now days. When we moved to Illinois 5 or so years ago, one of the things I bragged about to my Indiana family and friends was that McLean County had the biggest 4-H program in the state. I'm not sure that is still the case.

The "fairgrounds" is owned by the local Farm Bureau. That wouldn't be a problem, but it seems that the Farm Bureau is having trouble making ends meet. This year, they sold about half of the facility that has been used for the fair. No more nice, paved parking lots. No huge air conditioned facility. Yeah, the building the 4-H projects are in is pretty nice, but it isn't what we had before.

The commercial vendors are scarce. A lot of the aluminum siding and snake oil vendors - nothing you'd want to visit with the family. There were two agriculture exhibits, but they didn't include the two major equipment manufacturers of our state - neither Deere nor Cat were to be seen.

Some of the 4-H projects had 5 entries. Just 5. Wow. We've got some work to do to rebuild this program.