little wizards: Foodknow-how - no it doesn't grow in the supermark...

little wizards: Foodknow-how - no it doesn't grow in the supermark...: 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 gr...

little wizards: Playing with our food - NOT!

little wizards: Playing with our food - NOT!: Actually that's exactly what we DID do this week, the opposite of accepted food behavior. We had strict instructions to PLAY with our food ...

little wizards: Snowdays are anydays

little wizards: Snowdays are anydays: We had our first winter snowfall here in New York, so I thought it was a good time to talk about, and play with, both real snow and a popul...

little wizards: What is a ball?

little wizards: What is a ball?: I asked the children to share something they know about BALLS. This garnered some interesting, as well as predictable, responses! "Circle", ...

Playing with our food - NOT!

Actually that's exactly what we DID do this week, the opposite of accepted food behavior. We had strict instructions to PLAY with our food but NOT TO EAT IT. We made fantastic food art out of the skins, seeds, flesh and dyes of a load of different fruits and vegetables.

food art cornucopia

this was my favorite

the artist at work

The children both knew, and learned, about loads of common and uncommon food available to us now. Kudos to the families that offer kiwis, avocados and mushrooms to their families, I was amazed at what they knew about these foods even if they didn't like them. We studied the structure of fruit vs. veggies, including the confusing tomato which is really both, and the strawberry which wears its seeds on the outside. We squeezed red dye out of red chard, orange color out of carrots and purple out of blueberry skins. Then we painted with it! Everything got peeled and dissected and generally smushed around in order to get a sense of the many different materials forming our plant food.

ordinary and exotic foods to dissect

Milk and eggs, cheese and butter followed but I was not going to bring meat or fish into the classroom. We made do with illustrations for those. Quite a few children had been fishing actually and some had even eaten the catch! What a treat as well as a unique learning experience.
I hope the children identify some different foods the next time they visit the supermarket with parents, they will be impressed! The best food lesson we can give is to visit a working farm and have them pick and eat the stuff right from the plant - organic farms mean you can do just that!

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!

Snowdays are anydays

We had our first winter snowfall here in New York, so I thought it was a good time to talk about, and play with, both real snow and a  popular polymer substitute, 'Insta-snow'.

Insta-snow powder

 

 

Each child got a cup of real snow and we talked about how it looked and felt - no tasting allowed! "Cold", "wet", "white", "clumps", "melts", were among the observations made.

Adding red food color to the snow showed interesting effects - how it spread to all the particles and made colored water.

pink snowballs!

We then added WARM water to the insta-snow powder, which felt gritty at first, then EXPLODED as each particle absorbed 300x its own weight of water. This was a huge "Oooh!" moment, and plunging a hand into the 'snow' was a mindblower because it was of course warm, as well as feeling soft and slippery. Caution: spilling this on the floor makes for a slippery surface - watch out! Now we could add red food color to our insta-snow and compare the effects to the real stuff. You have to squeeze to make the color spread here, otherwise it remains inside the polymer particle.

comparing real snow with insta-snow

squeezing the color out of the polymer

many shades of red

Hours of fun followed as the children made fantastical sculptures, mixing the two different snows and generally having a creative blast!

good hands-on fun!

What is a ball?

I asked the children to share something they know about BALLS. This garnered some interesting, as well as predictable, responses! "Circle", "soccer", "throw it", "basketball", "football", "bounce it", "roll it", and so on. Then came the question: "When is a ball not a ball?" Answer: "when it's a football!" Looking at a circle - in this case a plate - shows that to describe a ball as a circle is only partly right. It's a circle no matter which way you look at it. A ball has properties other shapes do not - this we could test by playing with a variety of balls of all sizes and materials. Sports balls made a good discussion starter because each sport has different rules of play, which are partly dictated by what kind of ball is being used. There is a huge difference between a ping pong ball, a basketball and a volleyball. Each of these is driven in  different way - with a bat, with hands or with wrists, yet they are the same shape. A football though is thrown and kicked but it's shape makes the trajectory very unpredictable - unless you are a football player!

Playing with all the different balls was the best way to illustrate the variety out there!

The following week the children were given a sheet of newspaper and asked how you would make it into a ball. First we ascertained it did not behave like a ball - no bouncing or rolling. How to do it? Well before long the children had scrunched it up - it was instinctive for many of them - they did it before they could verbalise what the procedure was.

from flat paper to a ball

Making the perfect ball

left on its own, the paper would attempt to regain it's flatness so I had the children suggest how we could keep the ball shape. "Glue", "tape", "string", were offered and we settled on taping. Now this behaved like a ball although nothing had been aded to the sheet of paper - only the SHAPE had been altered. We bounced and rolled for a while, then made a ball out of clay to compare. Clay stays in the molded shape and can be made smooth so is a better ball in many ways.

comparing paper and clay balls

Finally we used our paper balls to knock down some empty soda bottle 'skittles' - we did pretty well there!

As an extra brainteaser I asked the question: "Can you make a circle out of toothpicks or straws?" The unanimous answer was "No!" but some children were able to say WHY. They conveyed the fact that the picks/straws were not 'bendy', using their hands to explain this if they couldn't come up with the right words. Well, as long as the circle is BIG enough, then the answer became "Yes we can!"

making a circle out of straight lines