Provocation - How We Organise Ourselves

At the start of every unit we have a provocation. This is a task designed to provoke the students to feel or think about something relevant to our unit.  For this unit children entered the class to find a wide range of food and books on display with question prompts designed to generate discussion. They began to make connections between foods and recorded some of their wonderings on a question chart. Children made some good observations as they smelt, touched and tasted the foods...reflecting on where they were from, how they were produced and how they had changed. Today we reviewed our questions and began inquiring into them. Some of the comments and questions I recorded during the session included;

• "Coconut juice is not white, how do they get coconut cream? Why is it in bottles not the coconut?'
• "Cocoa tastes bad but I thought it was chocolate. Why is chocolate sweet?"
• "Is popcorn from corn?"
• 'How do you grow noodles?"
• "How do I know if it's a fruit or a vegetable?"
• "Do they make sugar from sugar cane...how?"
• "Why is it called cornflour? You can't make flour from corn!"
• "How do they make cheese...I thought it had milk in it but how does it change?"
• "How do you grow pasta?"

So that we didn't waste any of the products, today we made a vegetable soup using some of the food. It contained corn, beetroot, garlic, onion, beans, lentils, noodles, tomatoes, potato, sweet potato, carrot, ginger, chilli and spices. It was delicious!

We still have a little product left...flour, palm sugar, icing sugar, and cinnamon sticks. So today we decided that our next project will be cinnamon scrolls! Yummy...afternoon tea anybody?

Children reviewed the foods we looked at yesterday and shared some of their knowledge with the class. Here, Signe is explaining what she knows abut corn, and how it is grown and used.

And on a completely unrelated note...I snapped this picture this week in the library. I love how engaged the audience are here. A future teacher perhaps?