Key Fact 1: All food comes from plants or animals.
a) To understand that all food comes from plants or animals.
Explain to the children that all food comes from plants or animals.
Use the Where does food come from? PowerPoint 301 to introduce this concept to the children.
- Can they name the foods?
- Do they know whether they are from plants or animals?
Draw two columns on the board (or on a large sheet of paper) and head them, Plants and Animals.
Place the Food Cards 301 into a small bag. Take a card from the bag. Ask the children whether it comes from a plant or an animal*. Start with some simple examples such as fruit and fish.
Briefly discuss the chosen foods, e.g.
- Who has eaten this before?
- What does it taste like?
Repeat 2 or 3 times.
Choose children to come and take a card, name the food and attach it to the right column. Discuss their decisions. Continue until all the cards have been used. You could use the Plant or animal? SMART Board 301 activity instead of the cards.
Ask the children if they can add further foods to either of the columns.
Show children the Plant or animal? Video clip. It would be ideal to show this on an interactive whiteboard, but it could also be shown on a class computer.
This video shows children trying to guess whether food is from a plant or animal source. You could arrange something similar with your children.
To help consolidate, use the Breakfast Worksheet. Ask children to recall their breakfast, stating which foods are from plants and animals.
*Explain as appropriate that:
- yogurt, cheese and butter are not directly from an animal, but products made with milk that comes from a cow.
- bread, pasta and noodles are made from flour, which is from a plant (wheat) and breakfast cereals are made from plants such as rice or corn.
b) To be able to sort a number of foods into plant or animal groups.
Recap that all foods come from plants or animals. Ask children for a couple of examples of foods from plants and foods from animals.
Demonstrate the Plant or animal? Interactive activity to the children. On individual computers, set children to work alone or in pairs on the Plant or animal? Interactive activity.
Give the children a copy of the Plant and animal pictures Worksheet 301 and the Plant or Animal? Worksheet 302.
Explain to the children that they will be cutting out the pictures of foods and gluing them onto the right columns on the Plant or animal? Worksheet. Check that the children know what the foods are before they begin and explain that all these foods come from the UK, e.g. plums can be grown in Worcestershire, and Salmon can be caught in Scotland.
Do an example of the cutting and sticking with the class. Allow the children to complete the rest of the work by themselves or in pairs.
When they finish, older children can add their own words or pictures of foods to the columns.
Alternatively, use the Plant or animal? 2 Worksheet. This is a single photocopiable sheet.
c) To be able to give examples of foods from animal sources.
Take the Food Cards 301 from the previous lesson and display those which show foods from animals. Question the children about each one:
- What is it?
- Does it come from a plant or animal?
- Which animal does it come from?
- Have you eaten this food?
- Do you like it?
Use the Animals PowerPoint to look in more detail at the foods from animals. Introduce the children to the Red Tractor logo and food assurance. Explain that it is important that animals are happy and healthy – use the Happy and healthy worksheet.
Use laminated and cut up sets of the Matching Cards 302. The children can then match different foods to their animal sources. Alternatively, these can be left unlaminated and the children can cut out, match and glue a selection of these pictures into their work books.
d) To be able to give examples of foods from plant sources.
Ask some of the children to tell you about a meal they ate recently. Draw and label the meal on the board. Ask the children to identify which parts of the meal come from plants. Repeat this a couple of times to help children understand that all the food they eat can be traced back to a source.
Show the Plants Video clip. Question the children afterwards to see if they can remember which foods they saw and how they were growing.
Show the Plants PowerPoint 303 and talk about what the foods look like when they are growing.
Look at a plant and ask the children to name the main parts, e.g. leaf, flower, stem and root.
Explain that we eat different parts of plants. Make it clear to the children that we do not eat all plants. Some plants are poisonous.
Hold up several foods which come from plants or use the Plant Cards 303 and ask children to name them and say which part of the plant it is, e.g. broccoli,(flower), apple (fruit), lettuce (leaves), celery(stem), carrots (root). Explain that potatoes are tubers. Tubers grow off the roots of potato plants. For cereals, explain that the part of the plant that gives us the grain is called the 'seedhead'. For this aged children, it might be easier to say that this is the fruit of the plant - the grain that we eat, e.g. wheat or maize (sweetcorn).
Hand out the Eating plants Worksheet 303 and talk through how to complete it with the children. You may like to list some possibilities before the children begin. They can use ideas from the PowerPoint and Video clip to help.
Recap with the children.
Some of our foods come from plants and some come from animals. Complete the Plant or animal Interactive activity with the whole class to test children’s understanding.
Different plants and animals provide us with different foods. Select different Food Cards 301 at random and question the children:
- What is it?
- Is this from a plant or an animal?
- Which part of plant/which animal is this from?
Demonstrate and then allow the children to use the Where do my meals come from? (5-7) Interactive activity. This should help reinforce where different foods the children eat come from.
Challenge children to link foods to The eatwell plate food groups. Use The eatwell plate food groups Worksheet to support.
Show the Juices Video and Recipe card and question children about the ingredients used. Can they tell you what part of the plant carrots, apples, pears and cucumbers come from?
Set up a cooking session so the children can make the juices. Can children come up with their own juices ideas?
Play the Poultry pairs activity (download from the file list below) to help children learn about the variety of poultry and the names of different baby and adult poultry.
Module link: Cooking, Key Fact 3. Guidance on setting up a cooking session.