Foodknow-how - no it doesn't grow in the supermarket!

Where does our food come from? That is the main concern of the next 4 weeks in our classroom.

We 'shopped' for play food and sorted our groceries into food groups. Fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, dairy, bread/grains. For each group I asked where the food came from. Overcoming the notion that it all miraculously grew in the supermarket took some doing! Even children who recalled visiting a farm or market didn't realise that that was where the food was grown, and that the supermarket selects stuff from the farm to be delivered. Orchards, where many children had picked fruit, seasonal farmstands and farms  where they got their pumpkins and vegetables, somehow these occasional and infrequent visits to the food source, had not been connected to the store where Mom and Dad took them for supplies. Animals were another dark area- chicken, steak and burgers got rave reviews on the menu, as did cheese, milk, eggs and butter,  but the idea that they were connected to real animals at all hadn't got to the front line! I guess eating animals can be an awkward fact to convey given the conflicting lessons in kindness to animals, never mind pets, but most of the children didn't seem appalled by the idea, just surprised. I didn't push it too much however and we moved on to grains, and how plants go to a mill and get scrunched to make flour. Better to restrict our explorations to stuff that can be picked or plucked!!

We made pretend 'meals' out of the 'food', and they all know what a healthy meal is, that's for sure! What a lot of veggie-lovers in this generation, it's great!