Northern Ireland Curriculum, Key Stage 2

Pupils are given opportunities to increase their awareness of the importance of both science and technology in everyday life. This is achieved through Investigating and Making and Knowledge and Understanding.

The materials support Science and Technology work by:

• Encouraging pupils to taste, handle and find out about a variety of fruit and vegetables.
• Investigating food preferences and making food products to meet their needs.
• Developing a range of practical food skills.
• Investigating the changing state of materials, e.g. different heat processes on food, browning of food.
• Learning about food and nutrition issues.
• Implementing realistic and effective food hygiene and safety procedures.
• Making food products – fruit and vegetable based recipes.
• Investigating the life cycle and harvesting of different plants.

In addition, the subject supports:

• the understanding of health through the context of a healthy balanced diet, using the Balance of Good Health as a model.
• practical work with food, using examples of recipes and activities to support food choice in relation to health.
• the study of the type, role and function of energy and a range of nutrients provided by food in the diet.

Health Education is taught as a cross-curricular theme – running throughout all subjects. For example, it supports Science and Technology by providing pupils with opportunities to develop positive attitudes to keeping healthy through physical activity, diet and personal hygiene.

These materials support Health Education work by:

• Promoting a healthier lifestyle through diet.
• Encouraging informed choice through fun and appropriate activities.
• Developing positive views towards physical activity.
• Highlighting the need for good food safety and hygiene.

In schools, activities may include:

• Keeping a personal diary of fruit and vegetable consumption, and feeding this back to the class for discussion.
• Organising fruit and vegetable quizzes or activity days.
• Participating in school or community events with a 5-a-day theme.
• Allowing pupils to make choices given to them in school about food.
• Exploring the reasons why a healthy lifestyle is important.
• Developing a whole-school food policy, looking at food choices throughout school.

These materials have been developed to be flexible teaching tools, enabling you to dip in and use them to support different aspects of the school day. For example, they may also be useful in:

• Maths – for example weighing and measuring, recording data, calculating costs or reading temperatures and timings.
• English – for example writing and following recipes/instructions, producing creative works (poems).
• ICT – for example recording the number of fruit and vegetables eaten in class and displaying this data as a series of graphs using a spreadsheet, undertaking basic nutritional analysis, using the internet to aid research.
• Geography – for example finding out where different fruit and vegetables come from around the world and how they are grown in different climates.

• You may also wish to use these materials to support extra-curricular activities – for example a school cookery club that operates after school.
• Parents may also be interested in having some of the activity sheets, or the web address, for use at home with their children.
• The recipes, information sheets and Bash Street figures can be used to make a bright, colourful display in school. This could be in the entrance hall, helping to inform visitors that yours is a healthy school, or within a classroom, perhaps with a fruit and vegetable display.
• School catering staff may also be interested in the recipes and display materials, perhaps organising a Bash Street Kids menu for a special day or week.