Fruit Miles

One of the things I do on my day off on a Friday is go to Tescos to do the weekly family shop.  We used to do it on a Saturday morning, but my younger daughter has started dance classes which are, you've guessed it, on a Saturday morning, and of course at a different time to her sisters'.

This morning I was accompanied on my shopping trip by my husband, who also has a day off today.  When we reached the fruit and veg section, I told him about the lesson I had with my Y3 class last week. 

We had watched one of the chapters of the BBC Active's DVD "Being Spanish", which shows some Spanish children picking nectarines in Valencia, and then following the nectarines' journey to the processing warehouse, the giant fridge and the delivery lorries, which then transport the nectarines all over Europe.

We then talked about where the fruit in our supermarkets comes from.  Some of the children had already noticed that some of the fruits that their parents buy come from other countries.  I asked them to have a look at the labels next time they are in the supermarket.  We talked about it again this week, briefly, but it was evident that they hadn't had the opportunity to look at the fruit, or had forgotten!  So when I was in Tesco today, I thought why don't I do a little survey to find out where all the fruits come from.

With my trusty HTC Desire I took photos of the labels showing where the fruits are from.  This afternoon I have PowerPointed them, ready for our lesson next week.  This has been quite a labour-intensive process just for one bit of one lesson, and so I thought it would be worth sharing here as I'm sure it will be useful to others too. 


Before you look at the slides, have a think about the questions I'm going to ask Year 3:
1. How many fruits did I see?
2. Which fruits do you think I saw?
3. How many countries were represented?
4. Which countries do you think were represented?


I'm going to get them to do some predicting in table groups, and then they can mark each others' while we look at the PowerPoint.

Fruit miles

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I'm hoping that the information will also raise important questions such as the environmental impact of importing all these different foods, why we import them in the first place, and which foods are in season when.  Even if we don't get onto that, they will be finding out the names of more fruits and the locations of more countries, which can only be good.