Food: local, organic, Fairtrade, imported from Spain or South Africa, bought in a supermarket or a farmer’s market, cheap, fresh, artisan…..the list goes on. When did food get so complicated? Food is one of the basic elements for human survival and something that unites us across the world – often in more ways than we imagine.
This year, I have been developing Global Citizenship throughout my school and reflecting on how this supports the new Learning for Sustainability agenda. I attended CPD run by Wosdec on Global Citizenship and Learning for Sustainability, as well as 'The Edible Garden' course run by RHS, both of which were very useful to beginning the process of embedding Global Citizenship and sustainability development throughout our curriculum.
Growing our food
Inspired by this professional learning, I decided to work on a topic about growing our own food with my class. This quickly grew to encompass a global, sustainable focus, through looking at climate change and food journeys and how growing our own food is a more sustainable way to live. I had originally intended to do this over one term, but there were so many learning opportunities that we have gone further and our focus this term has been on climate change and global warming, exploring the effect climate change can have on crops and livelihoods in other countries. We have therefore been looking at the greenhouse effect, causes and effects of global warming and what can be done to reduce it. Oxfam's education resources developed around their Grow campaign have proved very useful in exploring this. As part of this, children will also explore how farmers in Bangladesh have coped with the effects of climate change, through a floating garden challenge.
Outdoor learning
So far, we have address the Outdoor Learning component of LfS by bringing the outdoors in! We have started to grow our own crops - indoors, because it's been too cold to start them outside – and are growing potatoes, carrots, melon, tomatoes, strawberries, salad leaves, sweetcorn, onions and spring onions. Through this, the children have learned how to sow seeds and care for them. My classroom monitor job has never been so popular now that it covers watering the plants! The children get very excited as they see them growing and are eager to get outside! It is our plan after Easter to focus on developing the garden outside, when learners will plant out our crops and care for them. We will also be learning about enterprise and the setting up and running of a business with a view to selling some of our crops after harvesting.
Whole school impact
The wider school impact of this classroom topic has been significant. Each class will plant something edible in their class planters, and where possible, plan for inter-disciplinary learning through combining this with existing topics. For example, P7 are combining planters with their WW2 topic and growing potatoes. Our hope is that whole school involvement will ensure our edible garden is sustainable.
