A common theme expressed by educators is that children often experience a disconnect between the food they eat and its origins.
Food production is very important to us here at Junior Landcare and to help children understand the origins of their food, we have developed two new ‘Grow Your Own’ learning activities, which have just been uploaded in the Learning Centre.
First, we developed a ‘Create Your Own Chips’ activity sequence (because what kid doesn’t like chips!?!). This series of activities is designed to help children to understand the growing, manufacturing, and marketing processes involved in putting food on the shelf.
The sequence is composed of 3 parts: Growing, Cooking and Marketing. This sequence also lends itself really well to a Kitchen Garden program, similar to the bush tucker kitchen garden of Alawa Primary School.
But then we went a step further. We thought, what if you could Grow Your Own Pizza? First, we went and consulted with educators about how an activity like this could look and we also got feedback from our colleagues in food production here at Landcare Australia, to find out what they would like to see.
This activity is designed to help children understand the source of the raw ingredients used in making a complete pizza, from the flour in the base, to the sauce and the toppings, as well as the timelines involved.
Finally, we ask the children what they would need to plant, how much space they would require and what timeframes would need to be allowed for to grow a pizza from scratch (and whether this could be feasible!)
We hope you keep these activities in mind, as well as more Learning Centre activities, when you’re planning your curriculum for 2022/2023.