My subject area is biology, and I thought that I'd do a series of sessions around the subject of 'food' in a very general sense. I figured that with that as a theme you could link various different things to it, everything from how different animals and plants have evolved to eat what they do, for example, by looking at teeth on carnivore and herbivore skulls and comparing them. I thought that we might be able to talk about how plants get their food and energy (these are really clever kids who already know what photosynthesis is) and then perhaps tie it all in to food webs and how ecosystems function and how everything is linked that way (maybe get a little point in there about why conservation is important).
I might also talk about where food comes from and bring sustainability into it. We could do sessions where they might for example have to look through a shopping basket and think about what plant/animal the food comes from, what ingredients might be in a cake or a loaf of bread, how far that food has come in terms of air miles even. Perhaps we could even do a session on the science of baking bread and I could get them to bake a bread roll to demonstrate what yeast does.
Do you think that kids could be interested in this theme? I don't have any kids of my own so I just have to go off what my friends kids have been interested in when we've been teaching them how to grow food on the allotment. I've thought up a series of 'games' that they can play to make it quite fun for them. I'm also going to have to do an icebreaker with them at the start. They wont know each other as they'll all be from different schools and I've been told that some of them will be really shy as even at that age some of them will have already been picked on for being smart.
How sad is that. I'm slightly terrified, it's been years since I've had to be in charge of a group of kids.
), I was a gifted child, and I would have found what you're planning really interesting. At that age I really liked doing practical things and projects and finding out all around a subject in a cross-disciplinary way, if that makes sense. I would have loved making bread and learning about yeast and stuff like that. I still think it sounds fun now! My advice would be to not necessarily go too deeply into the doomy side of food production e.g. orang-utans dying so T***o can put palm oil in biscuits, that kind of thing (it doesn't sound like you are doing, but just in case) as I could see some of them fixating, and also, be gentle with them with the ice breaker, because yes, even at that age some of them will have had trouble.
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