Memories of a kindergarten food inquiry: "Where does food come from?"

Where does food come from: Stores? Restaurants? The soil? The water? The forest? Through play, we learned as much as we could about food. Cross-curricular connections to math (number sense, money, data management, measurement), language, health, and science.

Read a summary below of this learning journey, including reflections on the importance of having a solid understanding of curriculum expectations to catch meaningful ‘in the moment’ instruction and assessment opportunities:

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Memories of a food inquiry: “Where does food come from?”

One day, we listened to a presentation from Dairy Farmers of Ontario, and upon returning to the classroom, a group of students turned the big blocks area into a barn and played ‘milking the cows.’ This was exciting and very entertaining to the students; nearly everyone wanted a turn to be a cow. As this was going on, another student pulled some empty milk cartons from lunchtime out of the recycling and put them nearby in another area, explaining that he worked at ‘the dairy.’ He delivered milk from the dairy to a shelf, which was the ‘store’. I jumped in to play as well. Next to the cow barn I laid a brown blanket on the floor and called it ‘the field.’ I started planting pebbles as seeds in rows on the field. A couple of students who were playing with tractors came over to me and began driving their tractors up and down the rows. Another brought a bucket to pretend to water the seeds. This imaginative play continued for several days and led to questions and conversations about where different kinds of foods come from. 

The question “Where does food come from?” took us in many directions:

Outdoors, some students set up kitchens, using natural materials as refrigerators, stoves, ovens, dishes, and cutlery. Others made pretend bows and arrows and fishing rods and went ‘hunting’ and ‘fishing’ for imaginary animals and animals they built out of snow. I introduced books about indigenous life and students planned their play according to illustrations depicting hunting stories, fishing trips, food preparation tools, and cooking that happened over open fires. This brought meaning to the land acknowledgement we heard every morning, recognizing that our school is situated on the traditional land of the Anishinaabe people. We imagined how the Anishinaabe people who lived there first hunted, gathered, and prepared their food. Every day, we wrote about our experiences in our outdoor learning journals.

Indoors, we drew and labelled plans to create a grocery store. We filled our shelves with recycled boxes, cans, and cartons that students brought from home. We sorted our food items according to the shapes of the containers and boxes, put labels and prices on the shelves, and students shopped for items using school money. Store cashiers used a cash register and wrote ‘receipts’. Other students created a restaurant and some students turned the playdough table into a bakery, using big blocks as an oven. When they wanted a timer for the oven, we made a hundreds chart and taught the students to count to 100. When something was baking in the oven, the students counted to 100 before taking the baking out. We wrote recipes and prepared some real foods, like soups, pies, and cookies, and we made real fruit juices. We did surveys and made graphs about our food preferences, and we learned why it’s important to eat a variety of healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, protein foods, and grain foods.

Some students wondered where unhealthy foods come from, like the gummy treats in their lunches, or like the candies they saw in our nonfiction books about candy stores. The theory with the most support was that unhealthy foods grew out of the soil, just like fruits and vegetables and grains did. We decided to try to grow some treats of our own. We didn’t know if we should plant actual gummy candies or the wrappers they came in, so we planted some of each. Then some students wanted to plant goldfish crackers, berries, salt, and seeds from fruits in their lunches, so we planted those too. We also tested other theories about what might grow in soil, including sponges, and straws. We learned about distinctions between living and nonliving things, what plants need to grow, and why it’s important not to litter.

Reflections: 

The key to sustaining this inquiry and extending the learning in many different directions was having a large collection of library books that students looked at, which brought up new questions and interests day by day that we could delve deeper into together. This inquiry also confirmed for me the importance of having a solid grasp of the Kindergarten curriculum expectations, so I could infuse that content into our learning experiences ‘in the moment’, planning instruction and creating assessments that directly correlated to students’ play and interests in real-time.