Inglorious fruits and vegetables
In this activity students are introduced to ways of turning food waste into opportunities. This is done through an activity focused around an idea that took place in France to promote the purchasing of fruits and vegetables with odd shapes in order to promote discussion.
Materials Needed:
Handouts for the brief listening activity and discussion questions for the post-listening activity. A computer will also be needed to show the “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables video”, “Growing Avocado Tree Time Lapse video”, display images of inglorious fruits and vegetables, and a whiteboard/poster paper to write not allowed words for the Avocado video.
Full lesson plan on Google Docs:
Learning Objectives:
1. SWBAT debate and compare the situation in France with the local one.
2. SWBAT use an array of verbs and adjectives to describe objects with peculiar traits.
3. SWBAT identify innovative ways to reduce food waste.
4. SWBAT answer questions in order to demonstrate understanding of the video.
5. SWBAT use ordinal adverbs to describe what they see.
Part 1: Describing Growth
This warm up activity focuses around an avocado growing and it gets students into trying to create sentences in English as well as get used to listening in English for the video that will come later.
~15 minutes
Get the students into pairs.
Make student 1(S1) face the screen while the other student (S2) faces S1 with a piece of paper and a pencil/pen.
Explain that S1 will watch a video without audio while S2 will write on paper what S1 describes.
Write the words avocado, seed, green, and water on the board and tell S1 they can’t use these words when describing the video.
Play the video.
Have the students share what they saw vs. what they drew with each other.
Ask students if they would like to share their drawings.
Part 2: Movie Star Veggies
This activity introduces students to the idea that not all fruits and vegetables grow into the shapes we are all used to, and gets the students to use part of their descriptive vocabulary. The images can be found here. 10 minutes.
Get the students back to their normal seating.
Tell students that they will be shown images of fruits and vegetables and the students have to come up with creative names for them. Students can use verbs or adjectives and have 1 minute per image.
Show the first image and come up with a silly example (ex: “Run Radish Run”).
Allow students to come up with some ideas for each image.
Take some time to discuss the words that the students come up with.
Move through each image and repeat the last two steps until there are no more images.
Part 3: Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables
We now show the students the video that they will be discussing. There is a scaffolding sheet (see instructions) that includes some vocabulary and a couple of template sentences that can be used if appropriate. 10 minutes
Instructions:
Tell the students they are going to see a video called “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables”.
Ask them what they think the video might be about based on the title.
Distribute scaffolding sheet (Appendix C) with list of vocabulary words and sentence templates.
Play the video.
Part 4: Discussion
The discussion questions are available here. 35 minutes
Split the students into two even groups (or more groups if the class is large).
Give half the students the Post-listening discussion questions set 1 and the other group the set 2 questions.
Tell them they will discuss their questions together in small groups and then come back together with a student from the other group and discuss their respective questions.
Have the students write down their answers because they will be sharing them later.
After the small group discussion, get the class into pairs, but make sure there is one person from group 1 and one person from group 2 together.
Have the students discuss their questions and answers with their partner.
Come back together as a class and debrief/share any lingering questions/thoughts.
Part 5: Introduction to Adobe Flash
For the last day the students will have produced a video using Adobe Spark, which is free to use, or another recording software. They will then watch other videos by other students and comment on them. The video's topic can be flexible. The one we present as an example discusses the state of Colorado and how Colorado deals with food waste.
We have made a sample video that can be found here.
Explain that they will need to make their own video of an adobe spark video about food waste.
The video will compare their local food waste issues with the one in the video (Colorado).
Tell them the video that we are going to show is an example of what they will need to do.
Play the video.
Compile a sheet or create a google doc where the students can share ideas/strategies to reduce food waste.
Appendices:
Appendix A: Avocado timelapse
Appendix B: Pictures of inglorious fruits and vegetables
Appendix C: Scaffolding Sheet
Appendix D: Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables Video
Appendix E: Discussion Questions
Appendix F: Adobe Spark Video