The Little Green Thumbs Saskatchewan teachers have 5 options for the second classroom presentations:
- Where does your food come from?
- Agri “Culture”
- Amazing Plants
- Spectacular Seeds
- Super Veggies
So far, ‘Where does your Food Come From?’ is the most popular. I love leading this session, as it gets the students to explore our food system in ways that they may know, but have never fully put together!
Classroom Anecdote:
One great moment occurred when we were discussing a can of Green Beans with a group of Kindergarten to grade 3 students. I asked the students to look for the country that it came from, and they found that this can of Green Beans (just like the ones we grow here in our gardens), came from CHINA!!!
We decided to show the kids how far China is from Canada on a large map, and while we were doing this, a little boy had an ‘Ah Hah’ moment.
“Woah, you’d have to take a boat to get those here!!” he exclaimed.
His teacher and I looked at each other with surprise and amusement at his discovery, and we were so happy that the kids- even at that young age-can put the concepts together.
The other children fed off his enthusiasm and proceeded to name all the ways the food arrives in Canada… Trains, Planes, Cars, Trucks, Ships… which was next on my agenda!
Older students got to work as teams to create a chain of events giving us a visual display of where their food comes from. Through these exercises, students learn that many foods that come from the grocery store come from far away, and they learn to make informed decisions about where they are getting their food from. Encouraging students to look at the stickers on their produce to discover if the foods has been produced locally helps our local economy, as well as the environmental costs of transporting the foods.