Highlights
- One discussion topic
- A few ideas for educational activities
- A few ideas for cooking activities
How to explore where foods come from with children
Since you can’t always visit a farm, why not get creative?! Throughout the year, you can use snack time, for example, to hold discussions about foods and where they come from. Conducting food-related educational activities every so often will also help enhance these discussions by adding depth to certain topics.
Interested in discussing where foods come from with kids? Looking for relevant activities? Here are some suggestions!
Discussion topics
- Use our food cards to discuss where certain fruits and vegetables, eggs, wheat-based grain products, legumes and fish come from. The cards also include information on how milk gets from the farm to the table.
- Ask children about some of the foods in their meals or snacks. Do they know how the cucumbers are grown? Do they know how the yogurt is made? Do they have a vegetable garden at home or have they ever gone fruit picking?
A few ideas for educational activities for all ages
- Do a giant arts and crafts project or create a mural of a garden where various fruits and vegetables grow;
- Grow herbs in the ECE or at school;
- Organize a field trip to pick apples or squash;
- Organize a tasting of fresh, dried or dehydrated fruits (e.g., apricots, grapes, plums and prunes) and explore their different sensory characteristics;
- Experiment with dehydrating fresh fruit or re-hydrating dried fruit.
A few ideas for educational activities for ECE
- Sing our nursery rhymes about foods and where they come from (in French only);
- Visit a grocery store and set up a meeting with the baker or fishmonger, for example;
- Have the children do a role play about a food-related trade (e.g., baker, dairy farmer, apple grower, cheese maker);
- Organize a tasting of various foods from the same category (e.g., breads, yogurts, citrus fruits);
- Do the activities that accompany our posters.
A few ideas for educational activities for elementary school
- Use our resources for preschool students about food origins : poster Amazing World of Food, physical activity Who are you? Where do you come from?, etc.;
- Have students give an oral presentation or do a skit about a food-related trade (e.g., baker, dairy farmer, apple grower, cheese maker);
- Organize a tasting of various grain products and have your students discover which grains they are made from (e.g., whole-wheat crispbread, rice cakes, corn flakes, rye bread, oat flakes);
- Hold a science fair about cooking and food processing (e.g., making bread, cheese, yogurt);
- Have students make an advertisement to showcase their favourite nutritious dish and the ingredients that go into making it.
A few ideas for cooking activities
- Make bread
- Make ice milk
- Make hummus
- Make yogurt with or without a yogurt maker
- Make fresh cheese with milk and white vinegar
- Make the interactive recipes from The Little Chef’s Big Book of Recipes, available online
Whether you choose one of our ideas or come up with your own, the important thing is to talk about food in a positive way. That way children can have fun making all kinds of discoveries!
