In our "Food Chains" unit we learn about the four food chains that feed America, and we attempt to weigh the pros and cons for each. This unit culminates in students creating a website which will share information, and attempt to guide the eating choices of their fellow Americans. While we use some supplemental texts, this unit is based on the book The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Instead of using the cover art from the book itself, the cover art to the right was created by Amisaday Cedeno as part of an assignment for class. We agreed it was better than the cover of the actual book. |
Cover Art Compliments of Amisaday Cedeno
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Topic 1: Food, INC
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Our food unit always starts with the cinematic equivalent of a kick to the face. Food, INC is an incredibly powerful documentary that pulls back the curtain on the food industry. It's a great kick-off to our unit, because it creates such buy in from students that when we crack the spine of The Omnivore's Dilemma, the book practically reads itself. Also, images like "a golden river of corn" are really much more effective when seen. During the movie portion of this unit, we stop at particularly powerful images, and students make objective observations about them. Then, we practice making inferences, in this case, the inferences will connect the information in the documentary to students' own food choices.
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Topic 2: Background
While the Food, INC documentary does a great job at showing what students are in for during our food unit, it's a bit short on engagement for me to truly know whether students have background knowledge about our food industry. This week is devoted to developing schema, learning some of the lingo, and basically making sure we can talk the talk before we start walking down the long and winding road our food takes on its way from farm to table.
Day 1: Food, Inc. Discussion
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Today, we will use a four-corner's discussion protocol to connect students' food choices with the reality shared in the documentary Food, INC. Ideally, students' responses will refer to the powerful imagery from the movie, and connect that imagery to their food choices or their thoughts about the food industry.
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Day 2: Close Read Protocol
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Today, we'll read chapter one of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Students will read the research and descriptions substantiating the documentary they watched.
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Day 3: Building Schema
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Today, we'll start with a mix and mingle activity during which students share a series of quotes from famous authors, chefs, and politicians about the industrial food chain, and its impact on our environment. Once exposed to all the various sentence strips, students will create them into a complex mind map to quantify their understanding of the quotes, and by extension, the industrial food chain itself. Finally, we'll jump onto Google classroom for an exit ticket with which students will articulate the connections they've made between the quotes and the documentary or chapter one of The Omnivore's Dilemma.
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Day 4: Close Read Protocol
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Today, we'll delve deeper into the food chains that feed America.
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Day 5: Real or Processed?
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Today's lesson will start with a brief description of what "real" versus "processed" food means. As Food, INC. points out, we've become so separated from our food that we picture it in packages in a supermarket, not on a farm or in the woods. After explaining what real and fake food is, we'll use awesome Peardeck software to run through a series of engaging activities to demonstrate our understanding of the two types of food. Finally, to demonstrate individual knowledge, we'll make our second attempt to answer a ticket out the door in compliance with the NYS, 2-Point rubric.
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Topic 3: Intro to the Industrial Food Chain
This week, we'll start reading about the industrial food chain in our primary text: The Omnivore's Dilemma. We'll use our classmates (from previous years) websites to work as paired text with Michael Pollan's knowledge. The goal of this week is to get deep enough in the book that we've read enough "meat" to start engaging meaningfully with the information.
Day 1: Web-Design Examples and Non Examples
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Today, we'll start out by looking at some examples and non-examples of effective web design as a class to practice effective web, and model how to use the digital web-design rubric.
After this, we'll perform a gallery walk and students will view ten websites of varying effectiveness, and then evaluate them using our web-design rubric. At the end of class, we'll see how accurate and consistent our assessments of these websites are based on the data accrued in our rubric form. |
Day 2: Close Read Protocol
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Today, we'll read about the environmental impact of over fertilization.
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Day 3: Student Web-Design Exemplars
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We'll start today's lesson by looking at some of the 100% exemplars of last year's students work. I'll model how to evaluate two of the websites, again using our web-design rubric, and introducing students to the parameters of the project as we work.
Then, each group of students will be assigned a station to attend to evaluate another example of a student project. This will help students in two different ways. One: they'll see what amazing projects look like. Two: they'll be able to practice their website evaluation skills, which will come in handy when students are self-assessing their work as they progress. Finally, we'll do a quite run-down of how to start designing our own websites, and time to practice the Google Sites in a non-threatening and non credit-bearing way. |
Exemplars of student projects from last year (see bottom of Food Chains project page.)
Web-design rubric Google Sites |
Day 4: Close Read Protocol
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The proliferation of corn, and the fallacy that we "cannot" feed our human population will be revealed during today's reading.
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Day 5: Web-Design Practice
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Today is a structured work day during which students will have time to practice web design. We will pause once every ten minutes to do a quick "class survey" of our web-design principles and to share out useful tips and tricks.
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Topic 4: Ode to the Rogue Lunch Lady
Of all the TED talks we use in our curriculum, Ann Cooper's is one of my favorite. I love how she is a real-life lunch lady. She isn't some researcher who studies lunch ladies. She is in the trenches, growing healthy food for her kids every day. I also love her deep rage. Being our first paired "text" of the unit, we'll introduce our paired text connection tool this week. It is a refined version of the connection tool we used in our equality unit. We will, of course, continue reading in the Omnivore's Dilemma as well.
Day 1: TED Talkin' with Ann Cooper
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Today, we'll watch Ann Cooper's speech about how she has drastically changed the lunch program in Berkeley, California. She shares some amazing insights about how to fund revolutionary change for our students diet, and the importance of getting kids on the right dietary track early in their lives, and in a formal way within the constructs of the school day.
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Day 2: Close Read Protocol
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Today we'll learn about why all these meat labels are so into claiming that there are no antibiotics in the meat. Basically, we're feeding our livestock food that they can barely tolerate, and barely keeping them alive long enough to fatten and kill them.
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Day 3: School Lunch Evaluation
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Students will start out using a turn and talk protocol to summarize their learning from Ann Cooper's speech from Monday. Once students have discussed at their groups, we'll share out our collective learning as a class, and collectively create criteria based on that learning to assess our school lunch menu. Usually, we come up with something basic like a three-tiered plan: healthy, neutral, or unhealthy.
Once we have our criteria, each group will be given a copy of our March school lunch menu, and use those criteria to evaluate the health benefits of the school lunches that are available to our students. |
Day 4: Close Read Protocol
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Today we'll look at the intentional complexity built into our food, and question whether it's necessary.
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Day 5: Connection Tool - The Industrial Food Chain
**Details to be added soon. Pardon our mess.
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We've finally made it! The end of the industrial food chain. Honestly, the end couldn't have come fast enough. Did you see those vast ponds of pig urine? Yuck. To celebrate the end of our first food chain, we'll write, and design, the first of the four web pages that will make up our final web design project.
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The industrial organic food chain is so similar to the industrial, that neither we, nor Michael Pollan spend a lot of time describing it. We will introduce our second paired text: Tristram Stuart's "The Global Food Waste Scandal." While at it's core, the speech shares how deeply wasteful our current food system is, I find it hopeful that when push comes to shove, our planet is currently producing far more food than we could ever need.
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Tristram Stuart Transcript
Bilingual Chapters |
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We'll take our second crack at writing and web design this week. Hopefully, the quality and sophistication of both the writing and the web design can improve based on our examination of examples of each score point earned during the first round of web design.
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Google Sites
Industrial Organic Google Questions Writing tools page Web-design rubric Oral Presentation Rubric |
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We'll use a jigsaw reading methodology this week to study Joel Salatin's amazing Polyface Farm. I learned recently watching a Netflix show called The Paleo Way that if all farms were run like Joel's, all the carbon dioxide pollution that has been emitted since the industrial revolution would be reabsorbed and used by plants in only ten years. It's easy to look at the food industry from a zero-sum perspective (we have to kill the planet to feed ourselves.) Joel shows us another way.
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Bilingual Chapters
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Week 9: The Hunter / Gatherer Food Chain
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The hunter/gatherer food chain is by far the shortest, and so our study is accordingly truncated. The emphasis of this week is less on what food is eaten, and more on how time is spent, because it is important to realize that for a hunter/gatherer food chain to be successful, the people don't spend their time reading, writing, or doing web design, as our students do. They spend their time hunting, gathering, and cooking. If I'm honest, that doesn't sound like a terrible life to me.
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Week 10: Web Design Project - The Hunter/Gatherer Food Chain
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It's time to finish up our websites and spike the ball! Our food unit is at its end. We'll do our final presentations, our final web design, and then move forward into the glory that is our inquiry-based research unit!
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Web Design Project
Project DescriptionFor our food chains unit, we create and publish a website that answers the question: which food chain should feed the future of America? Click on some of the links below to see what amazing work our students have created. Students write evidence-based summaries of each food chain, and based on those descriptions, they craft a digital argument explaining whether or not each of four food chains should drive our future. There is no right answer! Each food chain has pros and cons, so students are free to truly explore their options.
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Success Skills
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Web Design Process [Sustained Inquiry Loops]
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This process is repeated four times: once for each food chain.
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Professional Website Evaluation |
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Web-Design Evaluation
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Super Student
Web-Design Exemplars |
Common Core Literacy Standards Addressed by this Project