To introduce the concept of organic farming I used this video clip…

We then decided which of the statements referred to organic farming using the ‘Which is organic sheet?’.

We then conducted a mini-investigation, entitled ‘Are Kirk Hallam families converts to organic products?’. This took around three lessons, also an opportunity to use ICT.

Finally to help add some explanation to our findings we completed the counterargument exercise.

Also good to use the classic Store Wars clip… this never fails to get a smile.

We had a couple of interesting lessons with this mini-investigative resource, we compared the fridges of two teachers, but it can be easily adapted to the students’ fridges. Involves a range of skills, we used this as a starter to the local ‘v’ global debate. Supporting resource to follow…

The first lesson we watched the programme and students completed an emotion line.

The second lesson we did a classification task.

As an alternate writing exercise, we’re going to produce a CEEFAX article, ,’old skool’, but I think it will really concentrate students’ thinking with regards content and audience.

The scheme aims to look at the issues surrounding food as well as develop geographical different skills.

In this lesson we rated our responses to national different dishes (I’m not sure they are the official ones!) and mapped the results, to add a bit of movement I printed the different slides and posted them around the room- seemed to work!

Resources can be downloaded here.

A bit of context is needed… the scheme is for year 7 and based around food, but it will deliver atlas skills, some basic numeracy and ICT skills. It will probably be taught around the mid part of the first half-term, so I’m looking at easing them in, as well as developing good habits.

I’m not sure whether this is the start of the scheme or not (I just wanted to make a start!), I’ve been thinking about how to open the unit. This was my first bit of inspiration.

So I was thinking about cultural differences in food etiquette…

This got me thinking about how national identity is sometimes, stereotypically, linked to food dishes. It’s how my mind works.

So the first part of the lesson involves a ten question type quiz, asking students to suggest a nation to a national dish.

I thought we could discuss a couple of things from this..

• how geography and history has influenced food choices.
• the role food has in culture and defining identity.
• how this identity might be used to stereotype nations.
• how these national dishes might be relics, due to globalisation.

Most of this, will of course, be discursive.  Lets not scare them!

I then thought about a task related to food etiquette, so produced a set of etiquette dominoes related to food and drink. I’m going to show the HSBC advert before this…

I suppose there is also a discussion about the impact of globalisation here on food etiquette. Perhaps a later lesson about fast food and the impact on different cultures. McDonalds is credited for street eating in Japan which was taboo.

Perhaps the weakest task is the final part of the lesson, asking students to research five favourite dishes and their origins. Not sure about this.

The resources are here.

As always feedback would be grateful.