Wave 13 - the best of!

Here's a range of activities, each divided into less/more time and complexity. This time they are Alex, Frances and Roy's favourites from over 560 produced since April 2020!

Less time / Less complex

1. Family fun: Plan and build an indoor obstacle course that includes 4-6 activity stations. Activities could include walking with a cushion or pillow balanced on your head, throwing balled up socks into bowls placed at different distances, and hopping across the room. Time your family as they complete the course. Keep a chart of times. Who is the fastest?

2. Literacy: Fruit and vegetable alphabet: find a fruit and/or vegetable for each letter of the alphabet. Choose two from your list and find out where and how they are traditionally grown. (Here’s an example using a range of foods.)

3. Art and safety: Create a health and safety poster for your kitchen at home. Include information on personal hygiene, food hygiene, and safety.  Make it bright and colourful so that it attracts the attention of your family or carers! Here’s an example!

4. Geography: ‘Drag the images’ in these food chains to show where food comes from! Try fish, eggs, wheat, carrots, potatoes and strawberries! Got more time, create your own game showing where food comes from!

5. Literacy: Find two different food adverts. Answer these questions for each advert: What is it describing? Who is the food aimed at? What is the message? In your opinion, is it a good advert? Explain your answer. Finally, would you buy the food?

6. Geography: watch these two interactive videos about ‘slippery salmon’ and ‘excellent eggs’ and answer the questions as you go along.

More time / More complex

7. Food and nutrition: Make a tasty burger with the Gourmet Burger Builder! Use the Be creative worksheet to plan recipes using four ingredients that you could add to a burger (burger mix, bread or toppings) from each culture or cuisine shown.

8. Science and nutrition: How well do you know your vitamins from your minerals? Try our new interactive Matching activity to test your knowledge of what foods provide different micronutrients.

9. Have fun with Disney: Get active with Toy Story and make an activity dice featuring your favourite characters! Or why not join Dash, from The Incredibles, and get through the maze! (Note: originally designed for use in the classroom.)

10. Food and geography: Meals and dishes – how well do you know the ingredients used to make them?  Look at the Meal cards and identify the ingredients in each meal or dish.  Choose one ingredient and find out where it is traditionally grown or produced.  Draw or download a Map of the world and mark each of the countries.

11. Food hygiene and literacy: Watch this Lamb feta burgers video. Write a list of everything that you see which relates to food hygiene and safety.  Produce a list of at least five top tips that could be highlighted on a recipe for the burgers.  There is also a version of the video available in Welsh.

12. Cooking and safety: Name the equipment and identify how it is used in the kitchen. Click on the ‘hotspots’ to see if you were right. Watch the videos and create a poster or leaflet to encourage safe use of kitchen equipment.

Less time / Less complex

1. Literacy: What’s on your breakfast menu? Create a menu for a restaurant that only serves breakfast. List a range of healthy choices, include a drink and make sure that there are fruit and/or vegetables in each option. For inspiration, why not research breakfast dishes from around the world!

2. Wibble wobble, jelly on a plate: Make a fantastic jelly using seasonal fruit, such as blueberries and strawberries. You could sing the following nursery rhyme whilst serving it! 

Jelly on a plate, jelly on a plate

Wibble wobble, wibble wobble, jelly on a plate

Jelly on a plate, jelly on a plate

Wibble wobble, wibble wobble, jelly on a plate!

3. Make your own cheese. Warm 500ml whole milk and add the juice of 1 lemon – as you stir you’ll see lumps form (the ‘curd’). Do not boil! Remove from the heat and leave for 5-10 minutes. Strain the milk through a clean cloth, in a sieve/colander, over a bowl. Wrap the cloth over the ‘cheese’ and gently press to remove the liquid (whey).  If you like, add other flavours such as herbs and spices. Pop the cheese in the fridge until you are ready to enjoy it.

4. What’s happening? When we prepare and cook food, a number of changes happen. For the following dishes, create a chart showing: each stage of making; what’s happening to the physical appearance of the food; and, why you think the changes are happening. Extra marks for using food science terms!

• Scrambled eggs on toast.
• Freshly baked wholemeal bread.
• Cauliflower cheese (with homemade cheese sauce).

5. Taste and flavour: Do you know the difference between taste and flavour? When eating food, the odour combines with the taste to give flavour. The texture, or mouthfeel, of a food may also help us recognise what it is. An experiment to test the difference between taste and flavour involves eating a pear. Wash the pear and cut into bite-sized pieces. Ask a family member to close their eyes and give them two pieces of pear. Don’t tell them what it is! Ask them to hold their noses tightly and eat one piece of pear. Ask them if they can tell what it is.  Ask them to release their noses and then continue to chew. Can they now tell what it is? Repeat with the second piece of pear.  You could also try a ginger biscuit, a raspberry, a piece of cheese, cooked bacon or cooked sausage.

6. Weighing and measuring: There’s something fishy going on! Work on your weighing and measuring with Ray Skate and the Learn with stories characters. Use a ruler and the Measuring worksheet to measure the length of each fish and learn about using scales to weigh with the What is the weight? worksheet.

More time / More complex

7. Food, Cooking and Health and wellbeing: Many people like take-away meals or having food delivered, but these can sometimes be high in fat, salt and sugar. Why not plan and make a healthier option ‘fake-away’ meal that you could enjoy at home with your family? There are lots of recipes here to choose from or find one in a recipe book or magazine. Use Explore food to calculate the energy and nutrients provided by the meal.

8. Food and art: Create an edible flower picture using a simple focaccia dough (made with 300g plain flour, ½ x 5ml spoon salt, 2 x 5ml spoons dry yeast, 2 x 15ml spoons olive oil and 250ml warm water). Use herbs for stalks and leaves (basil, chives, mint, parsley, thyme, tarragon and sage are all in season now) and sliced peppers, cherry tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, olives or onions for flowers/petals.  Decorate the dough with the ingredients to make a flower and then bake at 220˚C /gas mark 7 for 15-20 minutes.

9. Crimping crazy: Cornish pasties were made for tin miners to eat when they were working underground. The miners held the pastry crust while they ate the rest of pasty and then threw the crust away! Pasties are popular all over the country, but Cornwall produces more than 120 million pasties a year!  Crimping is the technique of sealing the pasty and a skilled crimper will crimp, on average, 3 or 4 pasties a minute. Make your own Cornish pasties and see how many you can crimp in a minute.

10. New product development: Effective new product design allows a company to respond quickly to consumer trends. View the New product development presentation and complete the worksheet. Find a food or drink item at home and list at least five ways it could be developed to create something new. Would the new food or drink appeal to the same target market as the original one? If not, explain how you have extended the product range to appeal to a new market.

11. Food, cooking and creativity: Partly prepared ingredients and left-over food can be used to make fantastic, creative dishes. For example, left over yogurt or crème fraiche could be used for homemade dips, or spare mashed potato used to make fish cakes,  potato and spring onion cakes or bubble and squeak, and pasta or vegetables could be made into a frittata. Create a dish at home which uses left over ingredients. It is important to remember that cooked food should only be reheated once.

12. Food and cooking: Do you prefer chunky or smooth? A simple tomato sauce is a great base for a number of dishes, e.g. spaghetti bolognaise or chilli, or can be used to top pasta or fish.  Small electrical equipment, such as a stick blender, liquidiser or food processor can be used to modify the texture of sauces to satisfy people’s preferences or to better suit a recipe.  Complete the activity and identify whether you and your family prefer chunky or smooth.  Once you have finished use the sauce to make a meal, for example gnocchi with tomato sauce, pasta fiorentina, ratatouille, or sausage chilli cha cha cha.

Less time / Less complex

1. Cooking, literacy and health and wellbeing: Find your fibre fortune. Get creative and make a fibre-filled meal based on three randomly selected ingredients. Use the instructions to help, and complete the worksheet – remember to use the Store cupboard ingredients!

2. Food and art: Join the dots to create a picture of an apple, a banana, a carrot and more! Why not stick your favourite on the fridge to remind everyone in your family to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables?

3. Food and numeracy: How much does your sandwich cost? Use the Costing your own super sandwich worksheet to practice costing ingredients. Why not look at the ingredients of your favourite recipe and cost the ingredients using an online supermarket?

4. Food, literacy and geography: List all the fruit and vegetables you eat in a week. Research where in the world they were grown. State if the fruit and vegetables are in season in the UK or grown somewhere else in the world.

5. Food, literacy and art: Build a healthy packed lunch for when you are back at school with our Lunchbox builder. Write or draw the food and drink that you are going to include in the lunchbox, and make sure to include everything suggested in the worksheet!

6.  Food, numeracy and health and wellbeing: How can you modify a recipe to reduce the amount of saturated fat, salt or sugar or increase the amount of fibre provided? Use the Modifying a recipe worksheet, to modify a scone based pizza recipe considering which ingredients you could replace, reduce or add.

More time / More complex

7. Science, literacy and numeracy: Read through the nutritional composition of milk, cheese and yogurt information sheets. List the nutrients shown in each one. Identify the three foods which provide the largest amount of each nutrient for milk, cheese and yogurt. Choose three of the nutrients on your list, put this information into a graph and describe your results.

8.  Cooking: Coley, also known as saithe, is a good value sustainable white fish.  Watch the Fish goujons cooking at home video and answer the questions.  To make your own fish goujons, follow the recipe.

9. Music: Compose a song about your favourite meal – the genre is your choice (such as pop, rap, classical, techno, country, folk, reggae, disco …). Why not create some music to go with it? https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/  (free from Google)

10. Where food comes from and literacy: Watch the Farm to fork videos and test your knowledge by answering the questions as they come up on screen! Get a pen and paper and note down your answers, or answer on the screen, and take notes on what you have learnt. Why not create your own 'farm to fork' storyboard for a food of your choice?

11. Health and wellbeing and IT: In July 2020, the government announced that all food businesses in England with over 250 plus employees will be required to calorie label food that is prepared and sold for immediate consumption by the consumer. Using Explore food, create a food label to show the energy (calories) for three dishes that could be served by a local food business as an eat-in or take-away evening meal. If you haven’t used Explore food before, the Explore food worksheet will help.

12. Food, literacy and art: Read through the International food culture and tradition presentation and create a poster showing examples of the cultures and traditions of three of the countries listed.

We have also shared a wide range of recipes and ideas for meals and healthier snacks over the last few months.  For even more inspiration, search the Food - a fact of life recipes.