KnowledgeBox resources are a recipe for success on World Food Day

Lesson ideas for your classroom

After many years, I have come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to be in school for much of the Autumn term without being surrounded by food  – not that I’m complaining!

Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/wheatfields/

We’ve had Harvest, Sukkot is coming and before long it’ll be Divali (I can never resist the barfi), Hannukah and then Christmas.

So with food being such a big theme this term I thought it would be good to tell you about  World Food Day which is next week (16^th October) and to point out some KB resources that could help you to celebrate it in your classroom.

What is World Food Day?

World Food Day is organised by the United Nations and aims to make us all aware of food problems around the world and to encourage us to work together against hunger, malnutrition and poverty.

So how can we do that in a key stage 1 classroom?

A great way of doing it is to talk to the children about where their food comes from, to get them to understand that we get our food from all over the world – and then to discuss the fact that some people in the world don’t have enough food and that this can affect their lives dramatically.

And KnowledgeBox has some great resources to get you started.

Resource 1: Where does our milk come from?

Type ‘From grass to milk’ into Quick find and you’ll get both a video clip and a great follow-up quiz to use on your whiteboard – both great ways of getting children to think about where their food comes from.

Resource 2: Where in the world does our food come from?

Type ‘Tea tonight’ into Quick find and use the Talking book with it’s really useful tools as a starting point for discussing where in the world our food comes from and the fact that we rely on other countries for much of our food. There are some simple maps in this resource to help you to introduce the global dimension.

Then you could get the children to bring in food with labels that state the country of origin and ask them to find these places using atlases. You can then create a great wall display using a big world map, pieces of string and pins, the labels and photos of the food the children bought in.

Oxfam has some great photo resources in their ‘Our Food Our World’ photo pack so it’s worth looking at their website if you want to go further.

(By the way Oxfam’s ‘Making a meal of it pack’ for KS2 has lots of resources if you need help un-picking the answers to the question ‘Why are people hungry?’.  The main website also has some very powerful images, videos and facts about the global food crisis and its effects – not suitable for key stage 1 but powerful resources to use at the top end of key stage 2 and a great reminder of how lucky we are and what we can do to help).

On a more cheery note don’t forget that when you’re looking for resources for Sukkot, Divali, Hannukah and Christmas later this term – just type those keywords into KnowledgeBox – you’ll find plenty of resources and save yourself lots of time.

Catharine, Producer