Go where it grows

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Activity Outcomes

Be active

Look after your body by being physically active.

Activity Details

20 mins

Indoors / Outdoors / At camp

Teams

Squirrels

Beavers

Cubs

Scouts

Explorers

This activity counts towards

Gardener Activity Badge

Squirrels Let It Grow Activity Badge

Squirrels Super Chef Activity Badge

Take it further

You could think about how factories are important for helping us access a wide variety of foods. What happens in factories? People might think about how some factories freeze fruit and veg (or put it in cans) so it lasts longer and we can enjoy it any time of year. Other factories might mix ingredients together to make products like cereal bars or ketchup. What do people think it’s like inside a factory?

If this topic’s captured people’s imaginations, you could arrange a visit to a farm, a city farm, an allotment, or even a factory, so people can see it for themselves.

Youth shaped guidance

Encourage young people to choose the sign they think and not always follow others. Remind them that other people could be mistaken!

You’ll need

A4 paper
Pens or pencils
Coloured pens or pencils
Sticky tack

Love trees?

If you want to take your love of trees further, why not check out our partnership with the Green Tree Badge. This will give you the opportunity to engage with trees in a new way and earn external badges along the way!

Green Tree Badge

Stick up the set up

The person leading the activity should use pens and paper to make signs that show places where food grows.
Each sign should be fixed up with sticky tack somewhere around the meeting place.
There should be a sign for each of the following: Field, Farm, Plant, Animal, Sea, Trees, Jungle, Underground, Bushes, River.

Find the food

The person leading the activity should ask the group to think about what they had for breakfast that day. They should try to imagine where the food they ate came from.
When everyone has thought about this, pick some volunteers to talk about what they ate and where they think it came from (e.g. ‘cereal’ from a field, ‘milk’ from a cow).
The person leading the activity should show the group the signs that they have fixed up around the meeting place. Explain that each one represents a different place that food comes from.
The person leading the activity should look at the ‘Go where it grows’ table below. They should read out a food item from the ‘Food’ column.
When they hear the name of the food, everyone should move close to the sign that says where that food comes from (e.g. for ‘potato,’ everyone should move towards the signs that say ‘underground,’ ‘plant’ or ‘field.’).

When everyone has chosen a sign, the person leading the activity should read out the correct answer(s) and also the information in the third column, before moving on to the next food item. Continue until every food item has been read out.

Food	Where it grows	Discussion / Fact
Chips	Field / Farm	Potatoes are vegetables but contain a lot of carbohydrates, which is why they don’t count towards your five-a-day.
Ketchup	Plant	The average person eats three bottles of ketchup every year.
Bread	Farm	Bread is made from flour, yeast and water. Flour is made from wheat, which you’ll see in lots of fields around the same time as the summer holidays.
Beef burger	Farm / Animal	Can anyone tell you what animal beef comes from? One cow can make more than 700 beef burgers.
Chicken drumstick	Farm / Animal	There are more chickens on earth than there are people – 25 billion! This is compared to just 7 billion people.
Fish fingers	Sea / Animal	The most common type of fish in fish fingers is cod.
Milk	Farm / Animal	Milk is really important to get lots of calcium in your body. Can anyone tell you why calcium is so important? ANSWER – To make your teeth and bones strong and healthy. People can drink plant milk as a substitute for cow’s milk.
Bananas	Farm / Trees / Jungle	Bananas are really good for improving your mood because of the vitamins they contain.
Cashew nuts	Trees / Jungle	Cashews grow in tropical countries, and need high temperatures to grow well.
Baked beans	Plants	Baked beans aren’t vegetables, but they do count towards one of our five-a-day.
Carrots	Farm / Underground	You can get different colour carrots, including red, white, yellow, and even purple!
Eggs	Farm / Animal	Can anyone say what type of animal the eggs we eat come from?
Scampi	Sea / Animal	Scampi is made from prawns.
Parsnips	Farm / Underground	Parsnips are similar to carrots.
Strawberries	Plants / Bushes / Farm	Strawberries have their seeds on the outside instead of the inside. Has anyone been to a ‘pick your own’ strawberry place? What was it like?
Peanuts	Underground / Plant	Peanuts actually grow underground. The plant grows above the ground, but the actual nuts grow underground.
Pasta	Farm	Pasta is made from durum wheat flour and water, and is very important in Italian cooking.
Blackberries	Plants / Bushes	Has anyone ever been blackberry picking? In many parks and fields, you can find wild blackberries during the school holidays, which are delicious and free. Just make sure you wash them first.
Salmon	Sea / River / Animal	Most salmon are born in rivers, live in the sea, and always return to the rivers to give birth – often in the exact place that they were born.
Mangoes	Trees / Jungle	Nearly half of all the world’s mangoes are grown in India. There, they eat so many of them, than only 2% of them actually get sent to other countries.

Reflection

The group has learned some more about where the food they eat comes from. Was anyone surprised by the origins of something they eat a lot? Does anyone think it looks easy to make a certain type of food for everyone to have enough, or hard? How many of these places should we eat food from and how often?

To assign each food item a place, the group had to work out where it came from and move between the signs. Was it tiring running back and forth? Were there any foods that made you disagree with someone else about the place it comes from? Were there any foods that you knew came from more than one place, meaning you had to choose one? How did you choose?

Safety

All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.

Active games: The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.