Steps
- HAND OUT – Hand out student booklets
- WATCH – Cue up the video below and watch it with the class
- THINK – Give students time to reflect and complete their booklet
- SHARE – Have students share their ideas with the class or work in their groups
- CONSIDER – Go deeper by adding an activity from the extension buffet below
- COLLECT – Collect workbooks till the next session
- FEEDBACK – Record your feedback below
Extension Buffet
- DISCUSS – What food grows locally? Do students have a garden at home or a family farm? Where can you find local food in your community if you don’t grow it?
- DAY IN THE LIFE – What if you could only eat local food? How would your meals be different? What would a day in your life look like?
- STICKER ACTIVITY – Have students open their lunch boxes/bags or bring fruit stickers from home. Stick on a map of the world to see how far food traveled. Discussion food transportation compared to growing food locally
- ECOCHALLENGE – Challenge students to reduce their lunch waste by making their own with the BR Granola Bar EcoChallenge
- DAY IN THE LIFE – What would your day look like for someone that only ate local food? Would their meals look different?
- DISCUSS – What food is growing in your community right now? Eating seasonally means eating locally grown food when it is available. For example, you eat fresh strawberries in spring and summer and not year-round because they don’t grow in BC in the winter. What seasonal food do your students love to enjoy?
- JOURNAL – All our food has a story. Have students write the story of their favorite food.
- MOVIE – A family bans all grocery store food from their house in the movie – First We Eat The movie follows a family with 3 skeptical teenagers, living just 300 km from the Arctic Circle that puts food sovereignty to the test.
- DISCUSS – Wild food tastes great and is as local as it gets. What wild foods have your students tried? Berries, fish, and wild meat grow in our forests. This is a great topic for your students who hunt and fish. What wild food have students helped harvest?
- CLIMATE – Climate-specific content *coming soon*
- INVESTIGATE – Have students become a detective and go into their cupboards to find where the food they eat comes from. Look up the countries on a map. Use the food miles calculator to calculate how far the food is from. Which food is closest? Which is from the farthest away?
- FUTURE LUNCH – Design a school lunch for a child in your community of the future. What kinds of local food will they eat? What kinds of ways will they have to compost and reuse? Will their lunch be zero waste? The students could have individual lunches packed at home or there could be communal ways that lunch is prepared for all.
- FIELD TRIP – Coordinate a visit to a nearby local farm, community garden, or other local food producers in your community
- WILD FOOD – Learn about what wild plants First Nations would eat in your area
- COOKING DEMO – Use the school’s kitchen to do quick and easy demonstrations of how to make food scraps pesto from carrot tops or banana peel bacon
- GROWING WASTE – Grow cut green onion roots (or other veggie waste like carrots) in water on a windowsill
- COMPOST IT – Find a person or group in your community with an active red wigglers compost bin and ask them to bring a worm bin to the classroom. The bin could ‘visit’ for an hour, or perhaps the bin could stay longer so the students could feed it.
This was an engaging video that inspired the students to think about how you could grow your food and have no food waste. THey really wanted to learn more about what is currently happening to control food waste. They also were interested in knowing what we would do in Sparwood if we had to grow the food we ate since winter is so long here. Adding more information about communities and what they are currently doing would help this lesson.
The idea of food production was well received by the students. How we reduce our carbon footprint and use water more responsibly was something students had some prior knowledge of. Having access to the Food Miles calculator was a great touch. As agriculture and farming are major industries in Creston, students could connect to the ideas. With fruit stands, orchards, and large-scale dairy production, students realized that they live in a unique area that can easily sustain itself. Many of the students who participated in this program last year were able to visit the Kootenay Food Hub. It would be great to highlight what is happening in our local areas and see firsthand what is happening. If it wasn’t for this program last year, I wasn’t even aware of the many steps being taken in our communities. Listing these places within our local communities would be great!
I would like to see what other options we have available for growing our own food. There was a discussion about how many-scale greenhouses can increase food production to meet the ever-demanding needs of our world. Or, more on the use of roof-top gardens or simply growing herbs in window sills to help food production. Lastly, I would like to see more emphasis on community gardens in our local areas. One student mentioned how the community garden would have a huge social/emotional impact as it gets people outside and gets interaction with people who may not normally talk (pretty cool).
The idea of local food production for local restaurants occurs in our town. The students had great connections and discussions points on this. I look forward to seeing how they incorporate the ideas into their city. The First We Eat movie was an eye-opener to a lot of students. A comparison of large-scale agricultural production to small-scale (local ) farming would have been good. Putting it all in perspective and seeing the difference between “it’s just in the store” and “I grew that” and what is involved could be added.
This was our best unit throughout the program – possibly because I am personally so passionate about local food production and gardens. Our school also has the benefit of being so close to our local community garden. Although we do not have many agricultural examples within our town, the references within the Kootenays were great. We also discussed Fernie examples that not everyone immediately thinks of as food, such as honey, kombucha, fishing and hunting. The food miles calculator was a great link. With so many ways to go within this one topic, a couple of more links to small scale food production would be helpful. We also researched more into the Fernie shipping container garden that is coming. A current link to this project would be great. We looked at New York’s urban agriculture as a great example of growing food and gardens within a big city.
Students completed this lesson with our TTOC. They enjoyed the video and the food miles resource. They spent the majority of time using the food miles. They engaged in good discussion on local farms, what we can grow in this area, what local garden options we have, hunting and fishing, as well as tying it back to the how close Creston is in comparison to getting fruit from across the world.
More resources on local examples would certainly be helpful.